Integrating LCA in concept of integral planning - accompanying LCA in early phases using Building Information Modeling (BIM)

The consideration of resource consumption and greenhouse gas relevant emissions is becoming increasingly important. The life cycle assessment method has been the basis for several years in sustainability assessment systems such as DGNB and BNB for assessing the environmental impact of buildings. So far, LCA has only been used as a verification tool and not within the planning process as an optimization tool. This is mainly due to the time required to set up a life cycle assessment. In order to reduce the expenditure of time and to facilitate accompanying building LCAs, a concept was developed which enables the use of building LCAs already in early planning phases on the basis of benchmarks and on varying degrees of detail. In addition, the level of information and the respective questions per planning phase were derived on the basis of the concept of integral planning; data gathering using Building Information Modeling (BIM) was planned and implemented. In total, four different levels of detail were developed, which, similar to the cost estimation of buildings, allow an estimation of the environmental effects in different concretization stages.