Developing a BIM-based tool to automate green buildings assessment: the case of Jordan Green Building Guide

Sustainable construction is often used to describe buildings designed according to criteria embedded in green building rating tools (GBRTs) systems. GBRTs often tackle multi-criteria, such as energy, water, indoor environment, and materials performance of buildings, requiring experienced professionals to conduct various assessment processes and simulations. Traditional CAD tools often produce different versions of building models for sustainability assessment to perform various performance simulations using building performance simulation tools (BPS) for cost estimates, structural analysis, building energy and daylighting performance. The manual assessment is often considered expensive and challenging,requiring extensive time and effort and, in some cases, could lead to errors and redundant work. The sustainability assessment of buildings is data-driven and highly relies on available building information and tools capable of processing and augmenting design data from the initial design phase. The representation of project information in digital environments, such as Building Information Modelling (BIM), has shifted the industry towards a more efficient practice. BIM was adopted to facilitate green building assessment by integrating with BPS tools and providing data-rich models for various assessment processes. However, the currently developed approaches tackle a specific sustainability issue in a specific standard, such as LEED's energy assessment. The existing literature concludes that currently, there is no comprehensive assessment tool that can streamline green building evaluation. This thesis aims to develop a BIM-based sustainability assessment tool that facilitates the assessment of green buildings. In this regard, we question the ability of BIM technology to provide the necessary means to automate the assessment of GBRTs. Hence, the integrated sustainability assessment tool (iSAT) was developed by first conducting a comparative analysis between selected GBRTs to highlight the maturity and comprehensiveness of the JGBG compared to others, which helped formulate a better understanding of the factors assessed, processes and complexity involved in the assessment process. Secondly, an algorithm was developed using an information technology approach to allow the integration of BIM data, BPS tools, and GBRTs to eliminate the complexity of processes involved and, thus, streamline the assessment process for the targeted criteria. The proposed tool was tested on two case studies designed and certified based on the JGBG. To conclude, BIM has shown a fundamental technical advancement over traditional CAD tools, allowing easier integration with BPS tools. However, not all GBRT criteria can be automated due to the nature of these criteria requiring professional body or expertise involvement. Nevertheless, the proposed tool can efficiently integrate BIM, BPS, and GBRTs, demonstrating that selected criteria are automatically assessed. Further efforts are still needed to overcome challenges while developing the tool, such as improving the quality of BIM-exported data models, developing a middleware tool to fix these files, and allowing for actual data inputs to improve the accuracy of BPS further.