An Alternative Approach to Material and EPD Mapping in The Development of BIM-based LCA and LCC Tools
Figure 4 in the paperAbstract
Building and construction industry is being criticized for losing oversight and strategic planning of its environmental and economic impacts. As a response, Life Cycle Costing (LCC) and Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) methods are increasingly being studied, evolved, and carried out during design processes of building projects. A practical approach to automate building LCA/LCC is using BIM software to automatically map materials in a Building Information Modeling (BIM) model to Environmental Product Declaration (EPD) and cost databases. However, these approaches often produce unreliable results due to using the material names in the BIM model to match in databases. That leads to inaccurate LCA/LCC analysis. This paper aims to propose a bottom-up material mapping approach, ensuring fast and accurate mapping of the materials. A tool will be developed in collaboration with two Danish sustainability consultants in architecture and engineering, and is empirically evaluated on a large Danish housing project in Aarhus, Denmark.
