Automation in Construction 57 (2015) 156165

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

Automation in Construction
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/autcon

Review

Enhancing environmental sustainability over building life cycles through

green BIM: A review
Johnny Kwok Wai Wong , Jason Zhou 1
Department of Building and Real Estate, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong

a r t i c l e

i n f o

Article history:
Received 1 September 2014
Received in revised form 2 April 2015
Accepted 6 June 2015
Available online 24 June 2015
Keywords:
Building information modelling
Green building
Green BIM
Environmental sustainability
Energy simulation

a b s t r a c t
The innovation of building information modelling (BIM) technology provides a new means of predicting, managing and monitoring the environmental impacts of project construction and development through virtual
prototyping/visualisation technology. This paper aims to provide thought-provoking insights into the shortcomings in the scope of the existing green BIM literature, and outlines the most important directions for future research. A total of 84 green-BIM-related papers have been reviewed and compared. Most green BIM research,
centres on environmental performance at the design (44 papers) and construction stages (25 papers) of building
lifecycles. Few studies concentrated on the development of BIM-based tools for managing environmental performance during the building maintenance, retrotting (8 papers), and demolition (12 papers) stages. It is suggested that a one-stop-shop BIM for environmental sustainability monitoring and management over a
building's full life cycle should be considered in future research. Future green BIM tools should also include the
three R's concept (reduce, reuse and recycle) in their sustainability analysis for both new development and
retrotting projects. The system should offer better integration with facility operation maintenance manuals
for more effective low-carbon management. The use of cloud-based BIM technology to enable the management
of building sustainability using big data is also needed. Despite these potential developments, it is argued that
the lack of computer tools and the complications of the BIM models are hindering the adoption of green BIM.
2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Contents
1.
2.
3.
4.

Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Sustainable buildings and BIM case studies
Research methodology . . . . . . . . . .
Research ndings . . . . . . . . . . . . .
4.1.
Building planning and design . . . .
4.2.
Building construction process . . . .
4.3.
Building operation . . . . . . . . .
4.4.
Building repair and maintenance . .
4.5.
Building demolition . . . . . . . .
5.
Discussion and future research . . . . . . .
6.
Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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156
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163

1. Introduction

Corresponding author. Tel.: +852 2766 5565.

E-mail addresses: johnny.wong@polyu.edu.hk (J.K.W. Wong),
jason.zhou@connect.polyu.hk (J. Zhou).
1
Tel.: +852 2766 4305.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.autcon.2015.06.003
0926-5805/ 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

The concept of environmental sustainability has stimulated transformational changes for the built environment, with reductions in the
levels of energy consumption and natural resource depletion that
have been required in traditional building life cycles. The architecture,
engineering and construction (AEC) industry has been criticised as a

J.K.W. Wong, J. Zhou / Automation in Construction 57 (2015) 156165

major carbon emitter and a relatively unregulated discipline in terms of

control and management of carbon emissions [106]. Although the concept of going green and environmental sustainability has been around
in the construction industry for many years, ofcial statistics indicate
that the AEC sector continues to be a major energy consumer. For example, approximately 10% of all global energy end-use takes place during
the manufacture of building materials [100]. Energy consumption in
the operation phase of building life produces 3040% of the total global
GHG emissions [99]. Construction and demolition (C&D) waste contributes about 40% of all solid waste in the developed countries [100]. With
the ever-increasing scarcity of resources and rising energy costs,
minimising energy consumption and restricting AEC industry-related
GHG emissions have become increasingly pressing challenges.
Over the last two or three decades, the developments of computeraided design (CAD) software and of building information modelling
(BIM) have changed the traditional design formats and communication
patterns of the AEC sector. BIM is dened as a set of interrelating policies, processes and technologies that generate a systematic approach
to managing the critical information for building design and project
data in digital format throughout the life cycle of a building [87]. In
such a system, construction project decisions are generated and communicated through the use of 3D models (see [10,69]). As BIM allows
for multidisciplinary information to be superimposed within one
model, this approach provides an opportunity for environmental performance analyses and sustainability-enhancement measures to be performed precisely and efciently [10,14,92]. Green BIM has become a
tremendously popular term and concept in building and construction
sector over the last few years. Despite its ubiquitous use, there is an apparent lack of academic denitions of what exactly a green BIM is
meant to be. So far, there has been limited academic and technical literature discussing the denition of green BIM. In the SmartMarket report,
McGraw-Hill Construction [76] provided an in-depth discussion over
the green BIM practices approaches in the construction industry.
Green BIM is considered the use of BIM tools to achieve sustainability
and/or improved building performance objectives on a project [76].
Wu and Issa [110] points out that green BIM is the synergies of BIM
and green building, which is used to help achieve green objectives and
to improve sustainable outcomes of the building development. Alawini
et al. [4] mentions the green BIM is a tool that is created to help building
design industry efciently integrate sustainable components, especially
in energy efciency application, into the building project lifecycle.
While academia has largely neglected the denition issue, industry
has moved forward themselves and provided their own denitions.
For example, contracting companies like Gammon considered green
BIM as a tool which utilise BIM along with sustainable design and construction techniques for making informed decisions early in the design
process and enables a greater impact on the efciency and performance
of a construction project. The application of green BIM should not be
just limited to the building sustainability analysis and management of
the design as well as construction stages, but also extend to the entire
lifecycle of a building, including operation (commissioning and occupation), repair and maintenance, and demolition stages. Summarising the
concept of green BIM above, we propose to dene the green BIM as a
model-based process of generating and managing coordinated and consistent building data during its project lifecycle that enhance building
energy-efciency performance, and facilitate the accomplishment of
established sustainability goals.
It should be noted that while green building has been used as a term
interchangeable with sustainable building and high-performance building
[118], high-performance building does tend to have a bit more to it than
the traditional denition of green building [24]. As dened by the Environmental Protection Agency [41], green building is the practice of creating structures and using processes that are environmentally responsible
and resource-efcient throughout a building's life-cycle. Highperformance building, according to the Energy Independence and Security Act, is the integration and optimization on a life cycle basis all major

157

high-performance attributes, not only environmentally responsible

(energy conservation and sustainability), but also safety, security, durability, accessibility, costbenet, occupant productivity, functionality,
and operational considerations [81]. High-performance building contains
high-performance, complex building services/systems (e.g. high performance HVAC system) that require ongoing adjustments and tinkering,
and change in the behaviour of users after the initial commissioning
[73]. The key to a high-performance building is optimization and integration of building systems [24]. For example, the interaction of between
the building occupants with the building systems like HVAC, re safety,
lighting efciency, etc [24]. Although these properties were certainly
also considered in a green building (e.g. the San Jose headquarters complex of the Adobe Systems Incorporated in California), but may not have
been emphasised. An example of high performance building is the Oak
Ridge National Laboratory Ofce Building 3156 in the United States
[98]. With the adoption of energy efciency renovations (e.g. highly efcient packaged terminal heat pump units, high efcacy lighting using
electronic ballasts), renewable energy utilisation (e.g. solar photovoltaic
power array) and consumption monitoring features (e.g. occupancy
sensors for HVAC and lighting control, smart energy saving power
strips, etc), it reduced the building's annual energy consumption by approximately 35% [98]. To enhance interaction among project team
members in the design of high-performance building, BIM plays an important role in generating iterations of the energy model to arrive at a
design decision on each high-performance building element.
In the last 20 years a substantial amount of literature on BIM
has been generated. Numerous scholars have conducted reviews
concerning elements of the existing BIM research and potential applications of BIM (e.g., [33,53,96,101]). Despite the growing understanding
of BIM and its potential in environmental sustainability in scholarly research, the development of green BIM has been criticised as immature,
ad-hoc and unsystematic [109]. The adoption rate of BIM in green
building projects is still very low and its full potential is yet to be explored due to the limited knowledge about this evolving technology
by the practitioners [109]. There is still no systematic review of the
main research efforts and achievements concerning the ways that
green BIM can enhance the environmental sustainability of buildings
[89,107]. With the gaps between industry needs and available academic
research, as well as the deciencies in our current understanding of the
concept, a review of existing green BIM development is needed. An inclusive review of existing literature also helps revisit the academic or
scholarly challenge of making disciplinary connections in light of current green BIM developments in the industry. This provides great benets to categorise where more efforts are required and thus the future
research directions of green BIM. An inclusive review of previous research can provide great benets in terms of identifying the areas
where additional efforts are most required and discerning which future
directions for green BIM research would be most helpful. The purposes
of this study are therefore 1) to review the major green BIM research efforts to date that apply to enhancing the environmental sustainability of
building life cycles and 2) to suggest the most fruitful avenues for further research.
2. Sustainable buildings and BIM case studies
In the US, buildings use up a large proportion of all energy resources,
including electric power and natural gas. Buildings also account for 40%
of global CO2 emissions [13,92]. Most of these energy consumption and
emission issues are related to the operation of buildings, including their
heating or cooling systems, operation of lighting, electrical appliances
and other building service systems [92]. With the escalating cost of energy and growing concern over the environment, the demand is increasing for more resource-efcient, ecologically sound industry
practices [8,9,12,14,15,19,52]. Individuals and international organisations have increasingly responded to the environmental costs of their
buildings by initiating rating systems for green and sustainable

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J.K.W. Wong, J. Zhou / Automation in Construction 57 (2015) 156165

construction [14]. In recent years, there have been a growing number of

regulations in many countries that mandate targets for energy and resource efciency and encourage emission mitigation in new building
developments or retrotting projects. Different rating systems are
being used in various nations to assess the environmental performance
of buildings. Such systems include Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) (in the US), Building Research Establishment Environmental Assessment Methodology (BREEAM) (in the UK), Green
Star (in Australia), the Comprehensive Assessment System for Building
Environmental Efciency (in Japan) and the Building Environmental Assessment Method (BEAM) Plus (in Hong Kong). Architects and planners
increasingly consider ways to minimise the environmental impact and
energy consumption of buildings through improved design, increased
energy efciency and conservation. The 2008 report from McGraw Hill
Construction found that the operating costs of green buildings are
around 14% lower than those of traditional buildings, and that this improvement can lead to an 11% increase in building values compared to
those of traditional buildings [75].
In view of the rise in concern for global sustainability, the means of
managing and minimising energy consumption and carbon (or GHG)
emissions over the full life cycles of buildings has been a fast-growing
topic of research in the elds of construction and engineering. One
stream of this research has focused on how construction information
technologies (such as BIM) can contribute to building sustainability
and overall performance. The full life cycle of a building involves the
processes of raw material extraction, building material manufacturing,
on-site material assembly, occupation or use, repair and maintenance,
demolition or deconstruction and disposal or re-use of the materials
[27,47,63]. BIM is regarded a multi-layered socio-technical system as it
contains the technical core and the social part, which combines the
man-made technology and the social and institutional consequences
of its implementation in society [124]. The technical core of BIM is the
software (i.e. BIM software) which enables 3D modelling and information management [124]. BIM software is designed and produced by
the vendors specically to work in a BIM framework, and can insert additional information, such as sustainability and maintenance information, into the model. Autodesk Revit is one of the commercially BIM
software which is available in the market which allows the users to design a building and structure and its components in 3D/4D model. BIM
involves the cutting-edge digital technology to establish the model.
Model in the BIM is a representation of an object or an idea, usually
with a certain degree of abstraction [66]. BIM technology can provide
an effective way to enable the integrated design of energy efciency
and the assessment of energy consumption over the building's life
cycle [48,115]. Connecting the BIM model to a decision-making tool
and to sustainability metrics helps to enable useful decisions in the
early project design stage and allows detailed sustainability trade-off
analysis to be made by referring to real project data. This process provides a means for modelling the impacts of decisions concerning design,
operations, maintenance and occupant behaviour-modication, thereby promoting a sustainable built environment through the use of
multi-dimensional visualisation technology [19]. Such an approach
also enables designers to assess various options for sustainable design
that promote energy efciency and resource minimisation in relation
to project costs.
3 . Research methodology
In this study, a comprehensive literature search based on the title/
abstract/keyword search method was rst conducted through the
scholarly publication search engine (Scopus). Scopus is chosen as it
covers a wider journal range (i.e. over 22,000 journals) [42]. It allows
multidisciplinary search and offers author proles which cover afliations, number of publications and their bibliographic data, references,
and details on the number of citations each published document has received [26]. Scopus also leads over other search engines in indexed

documents as well as citations in all research elds. This is especially evident in engineering & technology discipline [21]. The keywords used in
the literature search included green building information modelling,
building environmental sustainability, building environment design,
(whole) building energy simulation, and energy performance analysis. Articles and technical papers in refereed journals or refereed conference proceedings that included these particular terms in their titles,
abstracts or keyword lists, covering various stages in the entire building
lifecycle were considered. As green BIM is a relatively new technological
advancement, this review surveyed articles published between 2004
and 2014. Some of the top journals included in this literature search
were including, but not limited to: Automation in Construction (AIC),
Building and Environment (B&E), Building Simulation (BS), Construction
Management and Economics (CME), Engineering, Construction and Architectural Management (ECAM), Journal of Construction Engineering and
Management (JCEM), Journal of Management in Engineering (JME), International Journal of Project Management (IJPM) and Building Research and
Information (BRI). Article categories including editorials, book reviews,
letters to the editor or discussions/closures and comments were excluded. One hundred thirty-seven papers were scanned during this process,
and 84 green-BIM-related papers were identied and included in the
analysis (Table 1). The most frequently cited journal was Automation
in Construction (with 14 studies). The reviewed papers were then
categorised according to the key stages of building development.
These categories included i) building planning and design, ii) construction, iii) repair and maintenance, iv) operation and v) demolition. It was
also worthy of note that although ndings are illustrate by each stage
through building life cycles, some previous works in each stage are
also interrelated through the life cycle of building, not just an individual
matter only during a particular stage. The details of developments in
green BIM relating to each of these stages in the building life cycle are
discussed in the following section.
4. Research ndings
4.1 . Building planning and design
The planning and design stage is the point at which the most basic
decisions are made in terms of the sustainability, energy use and environmental design of a building [15,16,72]. Making informed and precise
design decisions as early as possible can help the process of sustainable
design to become far more efcient and cost-effective. For example, sustainability analysis tools allow the design team to make better-informed
decisions earlier in the process by quickly evaluating different design
options and identifying greener designs [28]. These analyses help planners to realise the implications of their building designs for the environmental performance and efciency of a building and its tenants.
Traditional design environments have provided much less support for
the designers or project team members to visualise the feasibility of
early design decisions. Azhar [11] suggested that design and construction practitioners in the US regard the green BIM tool as providing
some-to-signicant time and cost savings as compared to the traditional methods.
The potential of computational assessment methods and tools for
allowing actual environmental performance assessments of buildings
has been highlighted only since the late 1990s [38]. Before the widespread application of green BIM in recent years, several other computation or modelling approaches were adopted for assessing building
sustainability, [5,64,82,114]. For example, Brahme et al. [23] proposed
a model that integrated differential modelling, homology-based mapping and generative design agents to provide a comprehensive building
performance analysis in the early design stage. Baldwin et al. [17] applied information modelling and optimisation techniques to establish
an integrated model named the Design Structure Matrix. This model
enables designers to optimise the design process and helps to eliminate
waste during construction stage. Baldwin et al. [18] also investigated the

J.K.W. Wong, J. Zhou / Automation in Construction 57 (2015) 156165

159

Table 1
Publications in the area of green BIM published from 20042014.
Journal
AIC
JCCE
JCEM
JME
Other journals
Total

2004

2005

2006

2007

2008

2009

2010

2011

3
3

1
1

2013

2014

3
3

1
1

1
1
1

2012

8
10

potential of design information modelling for evaluating the options in

reducing construction waste from high-rise residential buildings,
i.e., prefabrication and pre-cast structures.
With the technological advancement and wider use of BIM, applications of BIM for making sustainable design decisions have become ubiquitous over the past few years. For example, Inyim et al. [54] established
a BIM-extended tool (SimulEICon) that enables decision-making regarding sustainability during the design phase of a construction project.
Lin and Gerber [71] developed a tool called the Evolutionary Energy
Performance Feedback for Design (EEPFD) that provides advice on energy performance at the early design stage by offering rapid iteration
with performance feedback through parameterisation, automation
and multi-objective optimisation. Krygiel and Nies [64] summarised
the different ways that BIM can aid in planning and design for building
sustainability. The benets they identied included the following:
i) assessing the building's orientation (for selecting a good orientation
that can reduce energy costs); ii) analysing the building's massing (for
analysing building's form and optimising the building's envelope in
terms of various factors such as the ratio of equivalent transparency
(Req) (see [29]); iii) conducting daylighting analysis; iv) investigating
the water harvesting potential (for reducing water requirements in a
building); v) modelling building energy performance (for reducing energy needs or analysing renewable energy options that can contribute
to low energy costs (see [58]); vi) examining the suitability of sustainable materials (for reducing material needs and using recycled materials) and vii) designing site and logistics management (for
minimising wastes and carbon footprints). Clevenger and Khan [125]
evaluated the contribution of BIM to the design-to-fabrication process
for building materials. They suggested that BIM can improve the building delivery performance and thus help to minimise any unnecessary
environmental impact due to design errors or miscommunications between different parties.
Scholarly studies in recent years have also demonstrated the ability
of BIM to assist with green building rating certication. For example,
Biswas et al. [22] developed a tool incorporating BIM technology to
help with the evaluation of environmental consequences from design
decisions. Their study involved one of the earliest attempts to apply
BIM to the rating and certication of green buildings. Barnes and
Castro-Lacouture [20] suggested that 13 credits and 1 prerequisite in
the LEED rating system can be directly assessed and documented by
using the Autodesk Revit BIM tool. Azhar et al. [14,15] also found that
17 credits and 2 prerequisites (which result in 38 points in the LEED)
can be assessed by adopting BIM software (i.e., Autodesk Revit or
IES Virtual Environment). In the same vein, Gandhi and Jupp [44] examined the potential application of BIM for the Australian Green Star
Building certication. Wong and Kuan [104] also explored the prospective application of the BIM tool in facilitating the BEAM Plus sustainable
building certication process in Hong Kong. Twenty-six out of 80 credits
in this certication system can be determined with the support of documentation produced by Autodesk Revit.
Recently, Jalaei and Jrade [55] developed a tool that incorporates
BIM, energy performance analysis and a cost estimating system to enable the sustainable building certication system in assessing a variety
of green building design options. Also, some types of commercially

10
12

7
7

9
10

5
7

10
16

2
8
16

Total
14
4
2
2
62
84

available software (such as Autodesk's Revit Conceptual Energy Analysis) have been developed to help designers in converting their conceptual designs into energy analytical models, thereby providing the means
for an integrated whole-building energy analysis. Other software tools
have been developed to support the complex processes of sustainable
design such as analyses of daylight and solar access. These tools can
also help in automating the drudgery of activities such as calculating
material quantity takeoffs.

4.2. Building construction process

The task of achieving cleaner, low-carbon construction processes
and greener jobsites has become a major concern in the construction
sector. Increasing evidence suggests that emissions from construction
activities are just as signicant as energy consumption in the operation
of in-use buildings. Therefore, the need for low-cost, effective mechanisms for monitoring construction-related emissions has been
emphasised [106]. Some early studies in this area explored ways to estimate the emissions from construction operations and to analyse the
impact of emissions over the life cycles of buildings [1,46,62,84]. Over
the past ve years, several prominent universities in the US, including
the University of Illinois [49,86], North Carolina State University [68]
and several others [51,67,9395] have initiated research into on-site
monitoring of carbon emissions with the use of BIM systems. For example, Artenian et al. [6] applied BIM and a geographic information system
(GIS) technology to optimise concrete truck mixer routes and minimise
emissions from the process.
Despite these research efforts, most of the early studies in this area
have been criticised for narrowly focusing on particular types of construction activities such as earthworks or concreting [106]. In the future,
more attention should be given to the development of a more accurate
and comprehensive tool for automatic emission data analysis and visualisation [49]. Wong et al. [106] developed a visualisation tool to assist
project team members in estimating and visualising carbon emission
levels during the construction process. This tool helps contractors to
identify the sources of the emissions and to quantify the amounts of
emissions generated.
Construction equipment is also considered a major culprit in the onsite carbon emissions problem [1,46,106]. Minimising such environmental impacts is an important goal of operation planning. An early
study by Martinez and Ioannou [74] applied discrete-event simulation
(DES) for modelling complex construction operations and helping to
provide reliable data on equipment operations for emission estimation.
Pea-Mora et al. [86] developed a framework for planning, monitoring
and managing construction site emissions. Their emission estimation
model helps planners to select low-emission construction strategies in
the planning stage. This model also provides a baseline to determine
the success of management decisions in the actual construction stage.
Hajibabai et al. [49] developed an integrated GIS and CAD-based approach for visualising, communicating and analysing greenhouse gas
emissions that result from construction activities and for graphically
representing the spatial aspects of construction. This system enhances
the visualisation of the distributions and dynamic variations of GHG

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J.K.W. Wong, J. Zhou / Automation in Construction 57 (2015) 156165

emissions, and it helps stakeholders to better analyse and understand

how construction activities affect the environment.
4.3. Building operation
Energy consumption in the operation (or use) phase has been reported to comprise a major portion of the total energy consumption
during the life of a building. This stage in a building's life cycle produces
about one-third of the building's global carbon emissions. For example,
residential and commercial buildings in the US currently consume
about 40% of all primary energy and release 20% of the national CO2 budget, mainly due to heating and/or cooling systems [36,39,95,112,116]. A
review of current applications for BIM as a tool of analysis for managing
environmental performance during the operation phase [30] has suggested various applications. These applications include the following:
i) analysis of heating and cooling requirements (see [97]); ii) identication of daylighting opportunities and means of reducing both the electrical lighting load and the subsequent heat and energy loads (see
[83]) and iii) selecting appropriate building equipment that may reduce
energy use (see [83]).
Commercially available software such as the Autodesk Green Building Studio involves innovative cloud computing technology for the analysis of building energy use. This software allows estimations of energy
consumption, predictions of carbon emissions and evaluations of potential for the use of renewable energy in an existing building. Property developers and investors increasingly expect that green BIM can serve as a
tool for helping them to achieve high energy efciency, to evaluate their
investments on green buildings and to offer reduced energy costs and
sustainability benets for prospective tenants. In term of facility management, BIM techniques should be of assistance for promoting efcient
building operation, improving the quality of service to customers, reducing the occurrence of emergencies in the building's operation
stage, improving safety performance and reducing resource waste. All
of these benets can lead to the creation of truly green buildings [36,70].
4.4. Building repair and maintenance
In the building repair and maintenance phase, retrotting existing
buildings can help to promote conservation of natural resources and signicantly cut a building's energy consumption, leading to a safer and
cleaner living environment [50]. With the increasing concern for enhancing the energy efciency of existing buildings during their operational lives, building managers are seeking ways to improve the
sustainability of their structures. The means of doing this include incorporating sustainable design attributes, reducing operation costs, limiting environmental impacts and increasing building resiliency. All of
these objectives have become priorities in retrotting existing
buildings.
A number of studies have recently emerged on the use of BIM in sustainable retrotting projects. For example, Motawa and Almarshad [79]
described a BIM-based knowledge-sharing system that consists of two
elements: a BIM system for data gathering or sharing and a case-based
reasoning (CBR) module for capturing knowledge. This system provides
a platform for facility managers and their maintenance teams to learn
from preceding experience and to survey a building's full record, including its record of maintenance for different materials and components in
the building. The integration of knowledge management principles
(i.e., embedded in CBR systems) with information management principles (i.e., embedded in BIM systems) is regarded as one way of
transforming current BIM applications to a new knowledge-based BIM
(i.e., Building Knowledge Modelling) [79,80]. Wong and Lau [105] constructed a series of 3D models to review the feasibility of green roof
retrotting for the existing buildings of a densely populated older district in Hong Kong. They analysed the overshadowing of the building
blocks, including their orientations and proximities to adjoining taller
buildings. Through the use of three-dimensional virtual modelling, the

sun path of the studied region was simulated to evaluate the amount
of rooftop area that would not be affected by the shadows cast from
the adjacent buildings. Hammond et al. [50] established the Sustainable
Framework and Best Practices for green retrotting. Their research
ndings suggested that BIM integration helps to implement sustainable
design principles into the renovation or retrotting of existing buildings. In a study by Jiang et al. [56], a set of RESTful programming interfaces were established to allow maintenance teams to access and
exchange data, including information on security and data privacy issues. This approach offered a server-centric BIM platform for energy efcient retrotting work.
4.5. Building demolition
With the increase of construction activities over recent decades, there
is an escalating concern for the environmental impacts of construction
and demolition (C&D) works. The ever-increasing amount of C&D waste
disposal in landlls, especially in developed cities such as Hong Kong,
has become a critical socio-environmental problem and a political issue
[32]. With the growing awareness of environmental sustainability, governments and industries in many countries have had to consider effective
C&D waste management practices. To alleviate C&D waste generation,
governments have introduced various policies. Hong Kong, for example,
has introduced a compulsory waste sorting scheme for government projects and a waste disposal charging scheme [31]. As the three existing
landlls in Hong Kong are expected to reach their full capacity one-byone from this year onwards, it is vitally important that the AEC industry
strives to decrease C&D waste and to attain a more sustainable system
of waste management. Other cities in the world are also encountering
similar challenges. Scholars have been trying to develop tools for estimating the waste from building demolition projects. One such tool is
SMARTWaste, developed by the UK Building Research Establishment.
This tool helps to estimate and identify the types and amounts of waste
products that will be generated onsite [25]. Such a model, however, requires detailed information from experts. The SMARTWaste tool depends
on the use of regional data, reliable and accurate record keeping and
waste accounting to realise its function. These complex requirements hinder rapid and accurate waste estimation.
So far, there has been only limited use of green BIM for managing
and monitoring environmental performance in the demolition phase
of building life cycles. In an earlier study by the Associated General Contractors of America [7], a digital BIM visualising tool was developed to
identify and estimate C&D waste materials. These data allow practitioners to develop a more cooperative and efcient material recycling
plan before an actual demolition or renovation. In the recent studies
by Cheng and Ma [31,32], a BIM system was set up that proved able to
extract the information on volumes and materials for every selected element in a building information model. This tool can incorporate the information for detailed waste estimation and planning which can be
used to predict the number of truck delivery journeys and the amounts
of statutory waste disposal charges. Akbarnezhad et al. [2] also developed a BIM-based model for assessing the impacts of various building
deconstruction options in term of their economic costs and environmental benets (i.e., minimisation of carbon emission and energy
consumption).
Recycling is considered to be a considerably more sustainable option
than the traditional means of demolition and landlling. Recycling not
only avoids some of the cost, energy use and carbon emission that are
incurred during the landlling process, but it also reduces the demand
for extraction of new materials by making alternative recycled materials
available [3,60]. The international construction community has increasingly advocated the sustainable use of resources and recycling of materials such as concrete, timber and steel. However, without detailed
prediction and planning for the types and volumes of recycled building
materials, it can be time-consuming and expensive for contractors and
recyclers to conduct a material recycling process [32]. If a building is

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161

Table 2
Summary of green-BIM related publications and their research focus in building life cycle (20042014).
Author/building life cycle
Akbarnezhad et al. [2]
Wu and Issa [110]
Zhai and McNeill [117]
Hammond et al. [50]
Frank et al. [43]
Jalaei and Jrade [55]
Wu et al. [111]
Zuo and Zhao [118]
Wong and Kuan [104]
Inyim et al. [54]
Volk et al. [101]
Lin and Gerber [71]
Katranuschkov et al. [58]
Kandil et al. [119]
Gandhi and Jupp [44]
Russell-Smith and Lepech [90]
Wong et al. [106]
Eadie et al. [40]
Costa et al. [36]
Cooley and Cholakis [120]
Costin et al. [37]
Clevenger and Khan [34]
Cheng and Ma [32]
Chi et al. [33]
Wong and Lau [105]
Yeheyis et al. [113]
Wong and Fan [107]
Buyle et al. [27]
Knig et al. [61]
Jrade and Jalaei [57]
Motawa and Almarshad [79]
Motawa and Carter [80]
Liao et al. [70]
Wu and Issa [108]
Rajendran et al. [89]
Rajendran and Gomez [88]
Cheng and Ma [31]
Jiang et al. [56]
Bynum et al. [28]
Azhar et al. [15]
Chang et al. [29]
Moon et al. [78]
Liu et al. [72]
Stadel et al. [95]
Hajibabai et al. [49]
Tzivanidis et al. [97]
Yuan and Yuan [115]
Welle et al. [103]
Heydarian and Golparvar-Fard [51]
Gustavsson et al. [47]
Shiftehfar et al. [94]
Sattineni and Azhar [91]
Azhar et al. [14]
Azhar [11]
Artenian et al. [6]
Bank et al. [19]
Chen et al. [121]
Schlueter and Thesseling [122]
Khasreen et al. [59]
Lee et al. [67]
Pea-Mora et al. [123]
Novitski [83]
Yoon et al. [114]
Barnes and Castro-Lacouture [20]
Ahn et al. [1]
Azhar et al. [13]
Azhar and Brown [12]
Hkkinen and Kiviniemi [48]
Kumar [65]
Howard and Bjrk [53]
Schlueter and Thesseling [92]
Autodesk [10]
Azhar et al. [16]
Baldwin et al. [18]

Planning and
design

Construction

Operation

Repair and
maintenance

Demolition

Others: General discussion of environmental

sustainability building lifecycle

(continued on next page)

(continued on next page)

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J.K.W. Wong, J. Zhou / Automation in Construction 57 (2015) 156165

Table 2 (continued)
Author/building life cycle

Planning and
design

Krygiel and Nies [64]

Building Research Establishment [25]
Biswas et al. [22]
Baldwin et al. [17]
Guggemos and Horvath [46]
Autodesk [8,9]
Middlebrooks [77]
Wang et al. [102]

Construction

Operation

Repair and
maintenance

Demolition

Others: General discussion of environmental

sustainability building lifecycle

designed properly, its components may be re-usable for the same or

similar applications as the original components. Re-use of building components preserves the energy invested in the deconstructed building
components by extending their service lives.
Some previous studies have attempted to minimise the C&D waste
generated from construction sites. For example, Wang et al. [102] developed a spreadsheet-based systems analysis model to assist in economic
evaluation for various C&D waste management scenarios. The ow data
(i.e., cost/revenue and management activities) of four different
building-related materials, namely timber, asphalt shingle, carpet and
gypsum drywall, were used to provide a costbenet analysis for various C&D waste management scenarios. As argued by Yeheyis et al.
[113], a comprehensive and integrated C&D waste management framework should be able to make the most of the three Rs (reduce, re-use
and recycle) and to limit the amount of construction waste disposed
of by implementing a sustainable and comprehensive strategy throughout the lifecycle of a building project. Table 2 summarised green-BIM related publications and their research focus in building life cycle
abovementioned.
5. Discussion and future research
From the review of prevailing green BIM studies given above, several
observations can be made. First, there is still lack of all-inclusive green
BIM tool that provides a cradle to grave management of a building's environmental sustainability, including the building materials, products
and energy required over the building's full life cycle [59]. If the energy
efciency of the whole building lifecycle of a project can be analysed in
an integrated approach as early as possible in the early planning and design stages, this improvement of energy efciency for the entire project
lifecycle will facilitate the true value of green BIM to increase recognition by the practitioners [4]. A one-stop shop green BIM tool should
be developed to provide life-cycle assessment that encompasses analysis of the environmental impacts of different building components and
assembly methods throughout the entire life of the building from construction to demolition [111]. Wu et al. [111] have recently developed
a real-time recording model that can measure crucial indicators
concerning the energy use and carbon emissions of buildings throughout their life cycles based on a radio-frequency identication detection
(RFID) system. Although previous studies (e.g., [37,91]) have shown
the feasibility of integrating RFID with BIM for various settings, further
efforts should be made to integrate RFID-based technology for realtime calculation of resource or energy use and carbon emission in a mobile BIM model setting. As material use inefciency in terms of embodied carbon migration is considered a major factor in the construction
industry's carbon footprint [45], the improvement of BIM tools can
also help by providing analysis of the options for mitigation of emissions
in terms of materials manufacturing, delivery and installation methods.
Second, the literature review suggests that the conventional BIM is
most commonly used in the early stages of building life cycles, especially in the design and construction phases, with fewer applications in later
stages of the building life cycle such as the maintenance or demolition
stages [40]. Although some recent BIM research has been developed to

assess options for the demolition and renovation of wastes (for example, [31]), there is as yet no effective application to deal with the demolition and deconstruction processes in terms of estimating the rates of
material recycling from a demolition, calculating the carbon emission
or footprint from maintenance and retrotting projects or assessing
the generation of C&D waste. Future BIM tools should include the concept of the three Rs (reduce, reuse and recycle) in their sustainability
analysis. These tools should also be capable of predening or automatically generating strategies to help identify the best deconstruction options for improved economic and environmental outcomes [2].
Furthermore, the BIM tool should be able to advise project teams on
how to retrot a building in a way that minimises the generation of
wastes. Existing studies have demonstrated the feasibility of BIM to
help with green building rating and certication, but many of these
studies have concerned tools at the prototype stage of development.
More studies are needed to develop a practical BIM tool for green building certication. The next stage of BIM development can also consider
how the system can integrate with facility operation maintenance manuals for more effective low-carbon management [43].
It is expected that a more complex green BIM model will generate
huge amounts of data and that greater information storage capacity
will be required for adequate monitoring and managing of a building's
sustainability performance. For example, Green BIM models could comprehend a vast library of embodied energy and LCA information, which
would allow the practitioners to make the environmental and lifecycle
comparison of different material and product specications [85]. The
potential of BIM for integrating the sustainable design and enhancing
the energy efciency of a building heavily depends on the integration
of reliable, latest, research-based information and the embedding of
trust-worthy evaluation tools [85]. The task of integrating all the associated knowledge domains that are important to life cycle management
will be a major concern, and this will involve a growing need for generating and managing a set of big data [35,61]. With the rapid development of cloud computing, the integration of cloud-based technology
and BIM provides not only a new means of information exchange during
the construction progress [108], but also offers a potential for better sustainability management over the building's whole life cycle. Cloud computing provides a shared pool of congurable computing resources
(e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, services) that can be
quickly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or
service provider interaction [35]. Such a service also allows for higher
levels of collaboration, transparency and information accessibility.
With the support of cloud-BIM, it is expected that the comprehensive
management of building life cycles will become easier and more commonplace for construction projects [35]. Recently, BIM software vendor
(i.e. Green Building Studio from Autodesk) started to incorporate the
cloud-based technology into the energy analysis tool provides a faster
way of analysing energy performance of building development. Future
studies should extend the application of cloud computing and managing
the big data in green BIM.
Green BIM adoption is expected to rise dramatically in the near future with the wider adoption of BIM tools in the building development
process in many countries. From a practitioner's viewpoint, a key

J.K.W. Wong, J. Zhou / Automation in Construction 57 (2015) 156165

challenge concerns the availability of suitable green BIM software. The

SmartMarket Report by McGraw-Hill Construction [76] surveyed
green BIM practitioners and found that the availability of welldesigned, reliable and user-friendly BIM tools is an important consideration for the adoption of BIM for energy performance simulations and
analysis. Lack of tools (26%) and complicated models (22%) hinder the
practitioners from adopting green BIM technology. Technical compatibility issues such as the interoperability of the BIM tool with other sustainability analysis models, for example, supporting gbXML format
(Green Building XML schema), an open schema developed to facilitate
transfer of building data stored in BIM to energy analysis tools, are signicant issues [65,78]. Cost of software licenses is another factor that inhibits a wide adoption of green BIM tool [85]. It requires the efforts of
the practitioners and software vendors to deal with these challenges.
6. Conclusion
Green BIM has been advocated for its potential to support environmentally sustainable building development through integrated design
information and collaboration. A review of the technical literature, publications, and statements from public and private sector suggest that
green BIM has emerged as a popular energy performance analysis tool
during a building's conceptual design stage. It has also been applied to
on-site emissions estimation and to visualisation to help anticipate
and monitor the carbon footprints of construction projects. But, green
BIM development has only started to scratch the surface, and its full potential is yet to be explored by practitioners. The shortcomings of the
existing green BIM literature can be summarised into the following
three major issues: i) limited research effort for managing environmental performance at the building maintenance, retrotting and demolition stage; ii) a lack of cradle-to-grave comprehensive BIM-based
environmental sustainability simulation tool; iii) insufcient consideration given to the current cloud computing technology and big data
management within the green BIM tool. In view of the above deciencies, a number of most important directions for future research in
green BIM areas is outlined in this paper as follows: i) incorporating
the concept of reduce, reuse and recycle in the BIM sustainability analysis; ii) integrating the BIM system with facility operation maintenance
manuals for more holistic low-carbon management during the building
use stage; iii) developing a more practical BIM tool for the purpose of
green building certication; iv) improving the compatibility and userfriendliness of green BIM tools; and v) more rigorous and collaborative
research between scholars and practitioners on how green BIM technology should be developed to achieve the goal of reducing carbon or
greenhouse gases from the entire building lifecycle. In addition, the
life-cycle costs and infrastructure management in the future research
work for BIM should include a sort of optimization algorithms that supports decision makers in their operational and maintenance plans
through-out the asset life-cycle time. This should be apparent in the
electricity plants, district cooling plants, water stations, etc. A dramatically high impact on the life-cycle costs will be recognised in case a
proper dynamic operational and maintenance plan has been prepared.
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