BIM-LCA Integration for Energy Modeling of Modular Residential Projects

Energy-efficient buildings have gained an increasing attention in the construction industry thanks to their significant contribution to saving world's energy consumption. Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) provides an opportunity to improving energy performance of buildings through a holistic assessment of their lifecycle. Previous studies have mainly applied Building Information Modeling (BIM) for exporting buildings' data into LCA tools. This process can be considerably time consuming and error prone especially when the procedures of matching and importing BIM data into LCA software are conducted manually. This paper aims to develop a framework to quantify the embodied energy (EE) of modular buildings through BIM-LCA approach. To do so, the EE of modular homes is estimated based on the boundaries defined by EN15978 Standard, which includes both fabrication and construction stages. An integration scheme of BIM and LCA is established in Autodesk Revit as a platform to evaluate the contribution of different building materials and stages in EE consumption. Despite current practices, this model contributes to facilitate changes during early design stages, delivering more energy-efficient schemes by integrating LCA into BIM to create a single platform for the energy quantification. The proposed framework is verified by developing a real case study on a modular construction project. This study is used as a base platform to quantify EE and reduce the environmental impacts of the modular buildings by guiding building designers to come up with a more sustainable and energy-efficient scheme at the early design stage.