BIM-based investigation of total energy consumption in delivering building products

Considerable efforts have been made to reduce buildings’ operational energy use over the last decades, but little attention has been paid to reduce the material transportation and construction energy. Focusing only on the operation phase forgoes the opportunity to reduce other building-related energy consumption, and even if the environmental impacts arising from construction and transportation are small as compared to the operation phases, its cumulative impact at the national level is of concern. The energy consumed by a building is divided into two parts embodied energy and operation energy. Further, the embodied energy is constituted of energy intensity of materials, energy consumed during transportation and energy consumed for construction. This paper proposes a methodology to integrate embodied energy consumption into a BIM platform and provides a seamless analysis based on available information. Plug-ins are developed to fulfill a convenient linkage between the BIM model and external databases. Simulation models are created, which can be used as templates for energy optimization during transportation and construction. By analyzing different resource combination scenarios, lower energy consumption can be achieved.