A Sustainability Extension of Building Information Modelling for Conceptual Steel Design

Capturing the building product in a single information model with high interoperable capabilities has been the subject of much research efforts in at least the last three decades. Contemporary advancements in Information Technology and the efforts from various research initiatives in the AEC industry are beginning to show evidence of progress with the emergence of building information modelling (BIM). BIM presents the opportunity of electronically modelling and managing the vast amount of information imbedded in a building project, from its conception to end-of-life. Researchers have been looking at extensions to expand its scope. Sustainability is one such modelling extension that is in need of development. This is becoming pertinent for the structural engineer as recent design criteria have put great emphasis on the sustainability credentials in addition to the traditional criteria of structural integrity, constructability and cost. With the complexity of designs, there are now needs to provide decision support tools to aid in the assessment of the sustainability credentials of design solutions. Such tools would be most beneficial at the conceptual design stage so that sustainability is built into the design solution starting from its inception. The sustainability of buildings is related to life cycle and is measured using indicator-terms such as life cycle costing, ecological footprint and carbon footprint. This paper proposes a modelling framework combining these three indicators in providing sustainability assessments of alternative design solutions. It employs the principles of feature-based modelling to extract construction-specific information from product models for the purposes of sustainability analysis. A prototype system is implemented using .NET and linked to the BIM enabled software, Revit Structures. The system appraises alternative design solutions using multi-criteria performance analysis.