Integrated Computational Life-Cycle Assessment of Buildings

A computational tool has been developed for the environmental evaluation of building designs. Construction and operation of buildings is a major cause of resource depletion and environmental pollution. Computational performance evaluation tools can support the decision making in the area of environmentally responsive building design and play an important role in environmental impact assessment, especially when a life-cycle assessment approach is used. For comprehensive environmental impact analysis to be realized in a computational support tool for the building design domain, such tools must have the following three characteristics: (1) An analysis method that considers the life cycle of building construction, operation, and decommissioning; (2) a representation that is able to accommodate the data and computability requirements of the analysis method and tool; and (3) be integrated within a multiaspect design analysis environment that can provide data on environmentally relevant building operation criteria. This paper describes a computational tool, ECOLOGUE, developed in response to these requirements. However, limitations remain in terms of data availability and the precision of the environmental impact assessment methods.