The coupling of BIM and LCA—challenges identified through case study implementation

To conduct an environmental Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) of buildings, the potential benefits of coupling LCA and Building Information Modelling (BIM) has gained a lot of attention among researchers recently. The expected efficiency gains, mainly coming from establishing the Life Cycle Inventory (LCI) in an automated way, can improve the process significantly. However, the application of BIM and building model’s varying Levels of Development (LOD) have implications on how the LCI should be structured and which LCA datasets can be used. The structure and completeness as well as granularity of a building model have to be clarified before deciding for the assessment workflow and tools used. Aiming for an efficient yet complete assessment, the implications of a workflow of establishing the LCI in Revit are discussed, refining the inventory in Excel and finally assessing the complete building in SimaPro. The study discusses the potentials, challenges and learnings from two BIM-LCA case studies investigated as part of the PEF4buildings project and presents the workflow developed based on these case studies.