A BIM-Centric Decision-Making Supporting Tool for Material Selection During Early Design Stages of Building Envelope

In Canada, the energy-efficiency requirements in building codes have been revised recently to decrease the energy consumption of buildings. This paper proposes a building information modeling-centric decision-making tool to automatically verify the code compliance of exterior walls according to building code requirements. The developed tool also provides the construction cost of building envelope materials. To demonstrate the developed tool, a case study is presented in which a more affordable code-compliance wall specification, in comparison to the baseline design, is identified for exterior walls. This study's main contribution is to increase the speed and cost-effectiveness of the material selection process.