Development of a Roadmap for Assessment the Sustainability of Buildings in Saudi Arabia Using Building Information Modeling

Achieving environmental sustainability is one of the important issues considered in many countries’ vision. Green/Sustainable building is widely used terminology for describing a friendly environmental construction. Applying sustainable practices has a significant importance in various fields, including construction field that consumes an enormous amount of resource and causes a considerable amount of waste. The need for sustainability is increased in the regions that suffering from the limitation of natural resource and extreme weather conditions such as Saudi Arabia. Since buildings designs are getting sophisticated, the need for tools, which support decision-making for sustainability issues, is increasing, especially in the design and preconstruction stages. In this context, Building Information Modeling (BIM) can aid in performing complex building performance analyses to ensure an optimized sustainable building design. Accordingly, this paper introduces a roadmap towards developing a systematic approach for presenting the sustainability of buildings using BIM. The approach includes set of main processes including; identifying the sustainability parameters that can be used for sustainability assessment in Saudi Arabia, developing sustainability assessment method that fits the special circumstances in the Kingdom, identifying the sustainability requirements and BIM functions that can be used for satisfying these requirements, and integrating these requirements with identified functions. As a result, the sustainability-BIM approach can be developed which helps designers in assessing the sustainability and exploring different design alternatives at the early stage of the construction project.





References:
[1] Ljungberg, Lennart Y. "Materials selection and design for development of sustainable products." Materials & Design 28, no. 2, 2007, pp 466-479.
[2] Bakhoum, Emad S., and David C. Brown. "Developed sustainable scoring system for structural materials evaluation." Journal of construction engineering and management 138, no. 1, 2011, pp 110-119.
[3] IPCC. “IPCC WG1 Fourth Assessment Report.” Cambridge University Press: New York, 2007, Retrieved from http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar4/wg1/ar4-wg1-spm.pdf.
[4] Hoffman, Andrew J., and Rebecca Henn. "Overcoming the social and psychological barriers to green building." Organization & Environment 21, no. 4, 2008, pp. 390-419.
[5] Rogers, John Peter. "The strategic adoption of building information modelling by Malaysian engineering consulting services firms." 2013.
[6] AGC. “The Contractors’ Guide to BIM.Ed. 1.” The Associated General Contractors of America, 2006, retrieved from http://www.agc.org/and workflows, Wiley, Indianapolis, IN.
[7] Azhar, Salman, Malik Khalfan, and Tayyab Maqsood. "Building information modelling (BIM): now and beyond." Construction Economics and Building 12, no. 4, 2015, pp.15-28.
[8] Edwards, Brian. Rough guide to sustainability. London: RIBA Enterprises Ltd., 2010.
[9] Vincent, Peter. Saudi Arabia: an environmental overview. CRC Press, 2008.
[10] Gasson, Christopher. "Tariff policy: a global perspective." In Saudi water and power forum, Jeddah. 2008.
[11] Taleb, Hanan M. "Towards Sustainable Residential Buildings in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia." PhD diss., University of Sheffield, School of Architecture, 2012.
[12] Alnatheer, Othman. "Environmental benefits of energy efficiency and renewable energy in Saudi Arabia's electric sector." Energy Policy 34, no. 1, 2006, pp. 2-10.
[13] Alrashed, Farajallah, and Muhammad Asif. "Saudi building industry's views on sustainability in buildings: questionnaire survey." Energy Procedia 62, 2014, pp. 382-390.
[14] Banani, R., Maria Vahdati, and A. Elmualim. "Demonstrating the importance of criteria and sub-criteria in building assessment methods." PhD diss., WIT Press, 2013.
[15] Reed, R., Bilos, A., Wilkinson, S., & Schulte, K. W. “International comparison of sustainable rating tools.” Journal of sustainable real estate, 1(1), 2009, pp. 1-22.
[16] Larsson, N. User Guide to the SBTool assessment framework. iiSBE, 2012,October 24.
[17] Shaawat, M. Essam, and Rehan Jamil. "A Guide to Environmental Building Rating System for Construction of New Buildings in Saudi Arabia." Emirates Journal for Engineering Research 19, no. 2, 2014, pp. 47-56.
[18] Taleb, Hanan M., and Steve Sharples. "Developing sustainable residential buildings in Saudi Arabia: A case study." Applied Energy 88, no. 1, 2011, pp. 383-391.
[19] Alyami, Saleh H., Yacine Rezgui, and Alan Kwan. "Developing sustainable building assessment scheme for Saudi Arabia: Delphi consultation approach." Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews 27, 2013, pp.43-54.
[20] Abdallah, Moatassem, Khaled El-Rayes, and Liang Liu. "Operational performance of sustainable measures in public buildings." Journal of construction engineering and management 139, no. 12, 2013, A4013008.
[21] Simos, J., “evaluation environmental: Un processus cognitif negocie. These de doctorat, DGF-EPFL, Lausanne, 1990a.
[22] Simos J. “Evaluer l'impact sur l'environnement: Une approche originale par l’analyse multicritère et la négociation,” Presses Polytechniques et Universitaires Romandes, Lausanne, 1990b
[23] Roy, B., Bouyssou, D. “Aide multicrit_ere _a la d_ecision: M_ethodes et case, Economica.” Collection Gestion, Paris, 1993.
[24] Roy, B., Mousseau, V. “A theoretical framework for analysing the notion of the relative importance of criteria.” Journal of Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis 5, 1996, pp.145–149.
[25] Shanian, A., Abbas S. Milani, Natasha Vermaak, Katia Bertoldi, Tom Scarinci, and Miklos Gerendas. "A combined finite element-multiple criteria optimization approach for materials selection of gas turbine components." Journal of Applied Mechanics 79, no. 6, 2012, 061019.
[26] Autodesk. “Revit 2010 API: Developer’s Guide, Version 1.0.” Autodesk,2009,http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/index?siteID=123112andid=2484975.
[27] Wu, Wei. Integrating building information modeling and green building certification: The BIM-LEED application model development. University of Florida, 2010.