AUTOMATIC LIFE CYCLE ASSESSMENT OF BUILDINGS THROUGH APPLICATION OF IT TOOLS

Abstract

With response to global campaign against climate change and environment deterioration, construction industry has realized its responsibility on reducing buildings environmental impacts and improving their environmental performance. As a result, Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) of buildings as a comprehensive environmental assessment approach has came into people’s field of vision. Benefited with the development of IT applications in construction industry, automatic LCA of buildings is embarking its way to construction industry’s limelight. This study aims to find out the current development situation of automatic building LCA as well as construction industry’s attitudes and application state in this area. These were achieved by a holistic elaboration and evaluation of the various automatic building LCA approaches currently available, a questionnaire survey conducted on local construction industry and a thorough investigation on the latest development of automatic building LCA approach. The evaluation results showed that the LCA capabilities of current building LCA software tools are insufficient, which however can be improved by the integrated assessment approach adopted by the latest developed LCADesign software as the investigation result suggested. Nevertheless, the questionnaire survey results revealed that widely application of automatic building LCA depends on construction industry’s recognition of the effect and usefulness of building LCA and then building LCA software tools and government bodies play an important role in the promotion as they are the highest possible users of these automatic tools.