Towards environmental design decision-making for infrastructure planning using parametric BIM

The AEC industry is responsible for 32% of the global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. The greatest potential to reduce the environmental impacts of infrastructure projects has been identified to be in the early design stages, where trailblazing decisions of the road corridor and the construction type must be made. We propose a methodology for an automated calculation of embodied and traffic emissions based on Building Information Models (BIM) of infrastructure assets. Our approach supports decision-makers in identifying optimal road corridors not only by means of design aspects but also by taking environmental impacts into consideration. Hence, we introduce predefined, parametric LCA profiles including cut-and-fill considerations, various road profiles, and structural assets like tunnels and bridges. The bill of quantities is automatically derived from the BIM model for the subsequent LCA calculation. Finally, the resulting GHG emissions of different routing variants can be automatically calculated and compared for holistic design decision-making.