Automated Green Building Rating System for Building Designs

As the sustainability of building projects has become of great concern for construction professionals, a number of different green building rating systems have been developed to help ensure that building projects are designed and built using strategies intended to minimize or eliminate their impacts on the environment. In the United States, although the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) green building rating system has been widely accepted as the national standard for sustainable building design, its assessment of green buildings is challenging and time-consuming owing to its complicated process. Such a green building rating process could be accelerated and facilitated by using computer technology such as building information modeling (BIM), an innovative, new approach to building design, engineering, and construction management that has been widely used in the architecture, engineering, and construction industry. To enable the green building rating for a building design in BIM applications, building information must be represented in such a way that the knowledge contained in LEED green building criteria can be extracted from the BIM model to support the assessment. In this paper, a building knowledge framework representing the LEED green building criteria will be presented. The proposed framework was implemented into a BIM platform to obtain an automated tool for the rating of a green building design. The development of the automated green building rating system and the results of its implementation will be discussed. (C) 2015 American Society of Civil Engineers.