Towards life cycle assessment of technical building services in early design phases using building information modelling

Optimizing the environmental performance of new buildings in early design phases requires the analysis and evaluation of impacts by life cycle assessment (LCA). Existing approaches using Building Information Modelling (BIM) for LCA mainly take the operational and the embodied impacts of the building construction materials into account. However, the embodied carbon of technical building services (TBS) has a significant impact on the whole building LCA and is rarely calculated in detail. This paper first presents a literature review on existing approaches of this research field. In a second step, a new methodology focusing on early design phases is presented.