Development of an Automated Tool for Buildings' Sustainability Assessment in Early Design Stage. (2017)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Kumanayake, Ramya; Luo, Hanbin
• Is Part Of: Procedia engineering. Volume 196(2017)
• Page Start: 903
• Page End: 910
• Publication Date: 2017
• Subjects: building materials -- embodied carbon -- life cycle assessment -- life cycle cost -- sustainability assessment; Engineering -- Congresses; Engineering -- Periodicals; Engineering; Conference proceedings; Periodicals; 620.005
• DOI: 10.1016/j.proeng.2017.08.023
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 1877-7058

Abstract

Abstract: As sustainability has become a much sought after criterion for adding value to a building, sustainability assessment has acquired a new momentum in the recent years. The early design stage, the most critical time for assessing a building's sustainability is particularly important in making decisions on building materials, which highly affect the sustainable performance of the final product. This paper presents a framework for developing a sustainability assessment tool for buildings in a computerized environment using life cycle assessment (LCA) approach. The embodied carbon and life cycle cost represent the environmental and economic pillars of sustainability in applying multi-criteria decision making approach to estimate the 'Building Sustainability Index'. Although the contribution of operational carbon dominates the total life cycle carbon of a conventional building, the importance of embodied carbon is increasing due to the energy saving technology and change in energy consumption behavior. Integration of the economic criteria in the form of life cycle cost provides a more balanced approach to sustainability assessment. The initial input is provided by an Autodesk Revit building model and the interactive sustainability assessment tool is developed using Visual Studio C# Object Oriented Programming language in the .NET framework, which is integrated with a Structured Query Language (SQL) database. The database is created by using existing databases such as Inventory of Carbon and Energy (ICE), relevant data from previous research and field data from building contractors, material manufacturers and equipment suppliers, especially in the context of South Asia. Using the proposed tool, various material combinations for a building design can be evaluated in terms of 'Building Sustainability Index', facilitating decision makers in selecting the optimum combination of building materials in terms of environmental and economic sustainability.