Towards a BIM-enabled sustainable building design process: roles, responsibilities, and requirements

Abstract

Environmental sustainability considerations are often treated as an add-on to building design, following ad hoc processes for their implementation. As a result, the most common problem to achieve a sustainable building outcome is the absence of the right information at the right time to make critical decisions. For design team members to appreciate the requirements of multidisciplinary collaboration, there is a need for transparency and a shared understanding of the process. This research presents the findings from 25 in-depth interviews with industry practitioners concerning 10 case studies of buildings, which achieved high sustainability certification ratings (e.g. BREEAM, Passivhaus, Part L), to identify best practices in sustainable building design (SBD). The results identify the key players' roles and responsibilities, tasks, deliverables and critical decision points for SBD. These components have been coordinated explicitly in a systematic process that utilises Information Communication Technology (ICT), Building Information Modelling (BIM), and Building Performance Analysis (BPA) software to realise the benefits of combining distributed teams' expertise. Keywords - IntroductionSustainable performance of buildings is currently a major concern among AEC (Architecture, Engineering and Construction) professionals due to measures such as building legislations in addition to national and regional targets (Schlueter and Thesseling, 2009). The overall goal is to reduce the environmental impact of buildings, while enhancing human comfort and health. To address this issue, many countries and international organisations have initiated rating systems (e.g. BREEAM, LEED, Passivhaus) to assess sustainable construction (Azhar et al., 2011; Haapio and Viitaniemi, 2008). Currently, these assessment methods are used as frameworks for environmental design by building professionals, although they provide no guidance over the design process. Also, the design of such high performance buildings is a complex, nonlinear, iterative and interactive process that requires effective collaboration between the multidisciplinary 2 teams from the early stages in order to achieve sustainability outcomes (Bouchlaghem et al., 2005;Yang, Zou, and Keating, 2013).Building professionals utilise performance analysis tools extensively in order to predict and quantify aspects of sustainability from early design stages and significantly ameliorate both quality and cost during a building's life cycle (Attia, Beltrán, De Herde, and Hensen, 2009;Crawley, Hand, Kummert, and Griffith, 2008;Smith and Tardif, 2012;Tudor, 2013). As a result, building performance assessment workload becomes heavier at the early design stages compared to traditional project delivery. Additionally, timely contributions of design participants and accuracy of the information delivered are important for SBD to be successful (Brahme, Mahdavi, Lam, and Gupta, 2001). For this reason, the most significant challenge to delivering a successful sustainable building is commun...

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