Life Cycle Assessment for Building Information Modeling

The availability of reliable results of Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) evaluations at the early stages of the building process allows comparing design alternatives in order to guide designers towards the less impactful ones. The aim of the research is to define the information content needed to qualify the digitized building model with environmental parameters coming from LCA evaluations, which increase as the Level of Development (LOD) is increased – as it for other issues. First analyses showed the difficulty of LCA methodology to ensure a complete representation of environmental data at the initial Levels of Development. This is due to the need to fully define the characteristics of the component in the transition from a very low Level of Development (LOD 100) to a very high one (LOD 400), that in the LCA evaluations resulting in significant increase of environmental impacts. Moving from these results, the study - through a wider case study of the systems under investigation - proposes to identify LODs that can ensure reliability of the results of LCA evaluations also when performed in a non-mature digital model.