Sustainable building certification systems, such as the one developed by the Ger-man Sustainable Building Council (DGNB), present a common and holistic baseline for what is considered sustainable in a building context. They provide designers and engineers with a concrete set of measures that can be implemented to optimize a building and make it more environmentally, socially and economically sustainable. However, sustainability is currently still more of an afterthought in the building industry, so it is necessary to reconfigure the conventional design process to include sustainability aspects as a design requirement from the very beginning of the planning process. By focusing on the early design stages, a disjointed and reactionary design process can be replaced by a more integrated and collaborative approach. Building Information Modeling (BIM) is perfectly suited to support such a process. Of the sustainability-BIM integration approaches investigated in this thesis, the methodology developed in the ONIB report (Leibniz University Hanover) presented the greatest potential for adequately documenting and incorporating the sustainability requirements set forth by the DGNB. In this approach attribute matrices are created that contain detailed model information requirements that can be validated with a model checking software. Based on this approach, a sustainability optimization tool was developed for the early design stages, utilizing custom Solibri rulesets that enable an iterative optimization process through straightforward and instant results. Two representative example criteria were implemented for model validation. It was discovered that for qualitative criteria the model spaces and spatial relationships are important for determining if the sustainability requirements have been fulfilled. Quantitative criteria, on the other hand, depended more on the specific material and object-based information stored in the model.     «

Sustainable building certification systems, such as the one developed by the Ger-man Sustainable Building Council (DGNB), present a common and holistic baseline for what is considered sustainable in a building context. They provide designers and engineers with a concrete set of measures that can be implemented to optimize a building and make it more environmentally, socially and economically sustainable. However, sustainability is currently still more of an afterthought in the building industry,...     »