BIM-based building circularity assessment from the early design stages

The target of this research is to develop a BIM-based Building Circularity Assessment (BCA) the framework that enables an automated assessment for measuring the building’s circularity from different levels of building’s composition (material, product, system, and building). Meanwhile, this framework can facilitate the design of the circular building by providing decision-making support. A literature review is carried out to identify the indicators that can reflect the progress towards a circular building throughout the whole lifecycle and determine the assessment model to be adopted by the BCA. Furthermore, the integration approaches between Building Information Modelling (BIM) tool and BCA are explored and evaluated. After that, the BIM-based BCA framework, which utilizes Dynamo for Revit as the essential tool to establish an automatic and efficient link between the BIM model and external building circularity database, conducts a quantitative BCA and generates the outcomes in Autodesk Revit. The designed Dynamo prototype, which is called Building Circularity Assessment Scoring (BCAS)
the tool enables to present the assessment results in the form of charts and override the Revit model elements with different colors. To validate the feasibility of this BIM-based framework and the designed BCAS tool, a case study is adopted. Accordingly, the circularity performance profiles of the case study are generated. The results reveal that the BCAS tool can assess a building’s circularity on four different levels of a building’s composition and provide the value of individual circularity indicators for the whole building. Moreover, the results also demonstrate that the design of a circular building can be promoted through the BIM-based BCAS framework.