BIM and sustainability integration: Multi-agent system approach

The Architecture, Engineering, Construction (AEC) and Facility Management (FM) industry is under pressure to move towards technological innovations as well as sustainability. New technologies are of great importance to sustainable design and construction processes by providing the means to act efficiently. Building Information Modeling (BIM) as the state-of-the-art technology in the industry provides a digital representation of physical and functional characteristics and information resources of a facility by forming a reliable basis to manage the processes and decisions during its entire life cycle. Despite the opportunities and potential advantages of BIM in sustainability for certification and decision-making, there are still challenges of integrated and collaborated systems. This paper addresses a more flexible and dynamic object-oriented approach for successful sustainable project deliveries. The aim is to provide a guideline through the development of an automated solution based on industry foundation classes (IFC) and a multi-agent system (MAS). The proposed approach comprises of three main phases, which are (1) development of sustainability assessment database and library, and extension of the criteria concerning the sustainability assessment methods into BIM software via property sets, (2) generation of the BIM model and its conversion to ifcXML and XML file formats and (3) evaluation of the data and presentation of the potential alternatives by extracting the related data from the converted file. It will support effective decision-making throughout the complete building life cycle by offering the possible criteria selection according to the user-provided project properties and certification level target.