Environmental assessment in construction using a Spatial Decision Support System

This research proposes a Spatial Decision Support System based on the Geographical Information System (GIS) to evaluate the environmental performance in construction. The system has been designed to add a spatial component to the current tools for the inspection and management of the sustainability of buildings and to assist the planners in their decision-making. The multi-criteria evaluation method developed in the Green Building Challenge and implemented in the software SbTool has been used as a reference. The evaluation method presents a hierarchical structure of criteria and variables which is applied to buildings spatially indexed in GIS and the environmental data of the buildings comes from an external data-base developed in Access. In order to validate the system, the environmental assessment of a group of residential, industrial and public service buildings during the phases of operation was simulated. The application of this tool in the inspection and environmental assessment of buildings allows the geographical scale of analysis to be extended to a group of buildings within the area of interest and consequently to extend the limits of its usefulness within the field of planning and environmental assessment.