Automatisation of Building Life-cycle Assessment : Parsing Bills of Quantities to Enable Early Building Life-Cycle Assessment

Abstract

This Bachelor’s thesis aimed at identifying potential ways to automatise the process of building life-cycle assessment, which is based on bills of quantities and industry foundation classes (IFC). An improved assessment is meant to make a life-cycle analysis (LCA) quicker and easier.

Construction project developments in Germany, Great Britain and France were reviewed to find out when and in which form electronic documentation is exchanged between the project stakeholders. Documentation susceptible of containing information relevant for an LCA was taken into closer consideration. In Germany, XML data was found to be widely used to write bills of quantities and calls for bids. In Great-Britain, standardised spreadsheets in the COBie format were found, as well as Uniclass building element classification. In France, no standard documentation format was found. However, recent government incentives suggest a future development similar to Great-Britain, based on IFC and spreadsheets.

The final year project found optimisation potential of LCA through computer-based analysis of electronic documentation. The result can be used to start working on parsing engines for the formats XML, COBie and Uniclass.