Applications of BIM in Support of Sustainable and Green Building
摘要
The construction industry contributes significantly to non-renewable resource consumption and the current global climate change crisis. Sustainability in infrastructure is hence, crucial, and identification of sustainable criterions and assessing their feasibility using Building Information Modeling (BIM) is the major focus of this study. BIM is advantageous for visualizing virtual buildings and resolving complexity, making it an efficient way to achieve sustainability in building during the conceptual phase. For the current study, a comprehensive literature review and an online structured questionnaire survey was conducted with BIM experts (academicians and industry professionals). 53 BIM experts have successfully responded to the survey and the data obtained was analyzed using statistical tool SPSS. The current study considered 10 out of 13 major sustainability criterions and 24 sub-criterions, with increasing productivity to save time and cost, optimize energy performance, and minimum indoor air quality (IAQ) performance being the most important and achievable using BIM whereas material reuse or use of sustainable materials, and outdoor air monitoring or increase ventilation were also deemed critical but not well achieved through BIM. Criterions such as transportation, quality, and culture were excluded from this research’s scope. The study emphasizes the importance of sustainability within construction industry and potential of BIM for attaining sustainable design for buildings. Hence, this research will be useful to public sector institutions in modifying their policies on raising awareness of sustainability in developing countries with various cultural practices and making BIM as a mandatory design and analysis tool in the construction sector for achieving sustainability.