1 Integration of LCA and LCC analysis within a BIM-based environment 1 2 Rúben SANTOS 1 , António Aguiar COSTA 2 , José D. SILVESTRE 2 , Lincy PYL 1 3 1 Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB), Pleinlaan 2, 1050 Brussels, Belgium 4 2 CERIS, Instituto Superior Técnico, Universidade de Lisboa, Av. Rovisco Pais 1, 1049-001, 5 Lisboa, Portugal 6 Corresponding author: Ruben.Santos@vub.be 7 Tel.: +32 02 629 20 10 8 9 Abstract 10 There is a growing concern in society for the environmental impacts of a built environment. In 11 this regard, the use of building information modelling (BIM) tools has arisen as a new trend in 12 the construction industry to improve the sustainable assessments of buildings in the design 13 phase. For that purpose, current approaches either focus on the use of BIM together with several 14 programmes, or solely use it for an automatic quantity take-off. However, as noted in the 15 literature, the lack of semantic information within BIM models can lead to ineffective decision- 16 making processes and models that are unsuitable for the operation and maintenance stages. 17 Therefore, the present study explores the potential of BIM as a repository for the life cycle 18 assessment (LCA) and life cycle costing (LCC) information, and how that information should 19 be used for an environmental and economic analysis. By doing so, the authors intend to discuss 20 the potential of BIM as a data repository and its capacity for supporting an automatic/semi- 21 automatic environmental and economic assessment. 22 A BIM-LCA/LCC framework was proposed, which led to the development of an information 23 delivery manual and a model view definition (IDM/MVD), using the industry foundation 24 classes (IFC) schema, for the integration and exchange of information within a BIM-based 25 environment. Finally, the authors implemented the proposed framework with a case study. It 26 is observed that, although most recent IFC schemes already consider some of the required 27 information, a considerable number of properties are still required to conduct a comprehensive 28 LCA and LCC analysis. Thus, the work presented here contributes to the existing background 29 knowledge necessary for future implementations of BIM-based LCA/LCC and for software 30 developers to develop a suitable BIM-LCA/LCC tool. 31 32