A Framework of Building Knowledge Representation for Sustainability Rating in BIM

Recently, sustainable building design, a growing field within architectural design, has been emerged in the construction industry as the practice of designing, constructing, and operating facilities in such a manner that their environmental impact, which has become a great concern of construction professionals, can be minimized. A number of different green rating systems have been developed to help assess that a building project is designed and built using strategies intended to minimize or eliminate its impact on the environment. In the United States, the widely accepted national standards for sustainable building design are known as the LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) Green Building Rating System. The assessment of sustainability using the LEED green rating system is a challenging and time-consuming work due to its complicated process. In effect, the LEED green rating system awards points for satisfying specified green building criteria into five major categories: sustainable sites, water efficiency, energy and atmosphere, materials and resources, and indoor environmental quality; and sustainability of a project is rated by accumulating scores (100 points maximum) from these five major categories. The sustainability rating process could be accelerated and facilitated by using computer technology such as BIM (Building Information Modeling), an innovative new approach to building design, engineering, and construction management that has been widely used in the construction industry. BIM is defined as a model-based technology linked with a database of project information, which can be accessed, manipulated, and retrieved for construction estimating, scheduling, project management, as well as sustainability rating. This paper will present a framework representing the building knowledge contained in the LEED green building criteria. The proposed building knowledge framework will be implemented into a BIM platform (e.g. Autodesk Revit Architecture) in which sustainability rating of a building design can be automatically performed. The development of the automated sustainability rating system and the results of its implementation will be discussed.