Sustainability-led design: Feasibility of incorporating whole-life cycle energy assessment into BIM for refurbishment projects

Abstract Growing climate change challenges and increasingly strict sustainability standards have led to a significant growth in the need for building refurbishment projects which are essentially focused on retrofitting in order to make them low carbon, energy efficient and environmentally friendly. The Waste and Resources Action Programme (WRAP) suggested that Building Information Modelling (BIM) should be used to achieve sustainability requirements during refurbishment projects as a correspondence to the National Audit Office (NAO) sustainability report. BIM is now widely advocated as the preferred tool for the management and co-ordination of design and construction data using object- oriented principles. The successful integration of environmental assessment into BIM for the whole of the construction lifecycle has not yet been achieved. The potential for using BIM in refurbishment projects specifically for achieving and managing sustainability requirements has not been yet critically reviewed or put into practice. This paper focuses on the use of BIM sustainability design tools in refurbishment projects, to achieve energy efficient buildings and achieve sustainability criteria for refurbishing non-domestic buildings. A critical lens is cast on the current literature in the domains of sustainable designs and the associated implications of the sustainability decision-support tools in BIM. The research also reviews the practicality of the existing sustainability decision-support tools that are currently used to assist with achieving environmental scheme certifications such as BREEAM and LEED for refurbishment projects.