Environmental Sustainability Assessment Of Factories With BIM: Relevance And Challenges For A Holistic Approach

Environmental sustainability is increasingly seen as a central objective of a factory in order to ensure the long-term competitiveness of industrial companies. In addition to growing social and regulatory pressures, the urgency is further emphasized by the increasing sustainability awareness of companies. This not only enhances their attractiveness to customers and investors but can also help to reduce costs. The assessment of the environmental sustainability of factories can be used in a variety of ways and in different planning and life cycle phases. For example, the ecological assessment can be used both in factory planning to select a preferred planning variant and in factory operation to record the current status. Conventional, often manual planning methods frequently prove to be insufficient to fulfil requirements such as the consideration of the entire life cycle of a factory or the demand for high data transparency. The use of Building Information Modeling (BIM) is a promising way of overcoming this challenge, as it is already used in practice to capture relevant information and data for the life cycle of a building. This article demonstrates the importance and challenge of assessing the ecological sustainability of factories from a spatial and process perspective using BIM. Based on this, requirements are formulated for a standardized and application-oriented procedure that enables a life cycle-oriented sustainability assessment of factories.