Sustainable building and BIM

Sustainable building design considers aspects of building performance, and environmental, economic, and social impacts. Sustainable design needs new type of information compared to traditional building processes. Because of the abundance of required information, efficient information-technological solutions are needed. Building Information Modelling (BIM) is becoming momentous in AEC industry and real estate sector to share and exchange information among stakeholders. BIM should be able to support the supply, integration and management of information throughout the building life-cycle (LC). LC information can be given in terms of product data and different kinds of assessment and simulation models. With help of this information, aspects of energy, indoor environment, environmental impacts, LC costs and service life should be able to be considered within design. BIM in its different stages should be provided with all initial information that is needed in the implementation of LC methods. Additionally, the results of assessments should be integrated with the different stages of BIMs in terms of indicators and guidelines. There are different solutions to integrate LC analysis software and BIM. These include separate software solutions that are able to use file exchange with BIM or can be integrated with a BIM server using a specific API. The analysis software may then have its own library for those pieces of information that are not included in BIM. The analysis software could also be implemented by programming new functionality to BIM software. An intermediate solution for these is the integration with help of parametric formats that allow not only representation of product information but also calculations used in analyses. This paper discusses some of the potentials and problems of integrating LC information with BIM. The paper assumes that a separate software solution connected to BIM is the most likely basic solution in terms of easiness to realise and use.