The University of Ottawa

Published purpose

The goal of this project is to design and develop practical methods related to the application of Open-BIM to facilitate the creation of a BIM-based model that can be used to validate and verify the life cycle cost and environmental impacts modeling and to automatically map the bill-of-work data with relevant inventory datasets at the different stages of building projects over their life cycle and to generate robust LCA results to be used for sustainability purposes. This project’s output will be principal for establishing the NRC OpenBIM-LCA web application and the performance of level benchmarks guideline, methodology and proof of concept for the bill of works for Canadian building archetypes. The successful development of this model will particularly provide a method for statistical- derived benchmarks as an approach that maximizes flexibility, applicability, transparency, and robustness to ensure claims’ validation to superior LCA performance over business-as-usual design/ construction/ use/ end-of-life practice. This BIM integrated approach, explicitly the concept of OpenBIM, is considered as a key contribution to aid standardization of the wholebuilding’s LCA practice and to add records to the bill-of-work database that will store records for potentially thousands of buildings. Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) will be used in this approach to transmit the data extracted from BIM models and exported into LCA tool, since it is well known that the IFC scheme for storing LCA-related information within BIM environment is a workable method that handles big volume of data.