BIM extension for the sustainability appraisal of conceptual steel design

Abstract

Oti, Akponanabofa Henry and Tizani, Walid (2015) A note on versions:The version presented here may differ from the published version or from the version of record. If you wish to cite this item you are advised to consult the publisher's version. Please see the repository url above for details on accessing the published version and note that access may require a subscription.For more information, please contact eprints@nottingham.ac.uk 1 BIM EXTENSION FOR SUSTAINABILITY APPRAISAL OF CONCEPTUAL STEEL DESIGN ABSTRACTContemporary advancements in Information Technology and the efforts from various research initiatives in the AEC industry are showing 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 embedded 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 indicatorterms 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 based on the economic and environmental sustainability pillars. 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 TM . The system appraises alternative design solutions using multicriteria performance analysis. This work demonstrates that current process and data modelling techniques can be employed to model sustainability related information to inform decisions right from the early stages of structural design. It concludes that the utilized information modelling representations -in the form of a process model, implementation algorithms and object-based instantiations -can capture sustainability related information to inform decisions at the early stages of the structural design process.

Structural sustainability appraisal in BIM

“…The process of recognising and identifying features from already designed artefacts and using acquired information for the purpose of building up another model (feature model) is termed feature extraction [52,53]. Aspects of feature modelling applied in this work have been discussed in Oti and Tizani [5,54]. Next from the top is the control.…”

“…These are combined with abstracted quantities to calculate the carbon footprint and ecological footprint measures of the design options. Further details on operation of the prototype has been captured in [5].…”

“…Once this decision is made and the relevant features are extracted, the sequence of assessment steps through the estimation of Initial Cost, Life Cycle Cost (LCC), Carbon Footprint, and Ecological Footprint. The theories surrounding these indicators and their selection for this study have been discussed in [5]. At decision points such as "Perform risk and sensitivity analysis" common to Initial Cost and Economic (LCC) flow blocks, the onus rests on the designers to make the decision to call the function to carry out corresponding risk and sensitivity analysis, which then moves on to the aspect of environmental analysis.…”

“…The sustainability indicators constitute the control of the system which uses features extracted from the conceptual model as input into the system. The selection and background theories of the indicators have been covered in Oti and Tizani [5,55]. The modelling database contains information on properties and costs of structural elements (framing, floor, roofing and cladding types) that work as mechanism based on the functional instantiations.…”

“…As such, the literature review of this paper discussed the investigation of API implementations in embedding applications in BIM-enabled environments as it is an essential part of the preliminary phase of this research. The review of algorithms and aspects on feature based modelling and information modelling have been covered elsewhere [5].…”