A Computer-based LCA Tool for Sustainable Building Design

In the last two decades the interest in design sustainable buildings has developed rapidly. Design sustainable building is necessary to achieve a sustainable society. Moreover, recent design projects have become too big and too complicated to depend solely on personal artistry. Today we live in a world in which technological development, together with social and economic changes are so rapid. Projects become so complex that the traditional architect-centered design process is no longer feasible. In this paper, we propose a model for designing a computer-based life-cycle assessment (LCA) tool to achieve sustainable building design in a simplified systematic way. This model aims at computerizing the briefing stage of design and allows the designer to deal in a systematic way with complexity, quantity and variety of information of this crucial stage. The model consists of two main phases: first we create a knowledge base then we map and present the knowledge-base into a computer system. In this paper we concentrate mainly on the first phase, i.e., creating the knowledge-base. The second phase is described briefly and more details about it will be described in future work. Implementation for the LCA tool has been discussed to show the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed model.