Proceedings of the CIB W78 2012: 29 th International Conference –Beirut, Lebanon, 17-19 October A FRAMEWORK FOR MODELING THE ADOPTION PROCESS OF CONSTRUCTION SUSTAINABILITY POLICIES: AN AGENT-BASED SIMULATION APPROACH M. Mansour Hassan, Ph.D. Student, mmhassan@purdue.edu Amr Kandil, Assistant Professor, akandil@purdue.edu Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN. 47907-2017, USA Ahmed Senouci, Associate Professor, a.senouci@qu.edu.qa Hassan Al-Derham, Vice President for Research, alderham@qu.edu.qa Qatar University, PO Box 2713, Doha, Qatar Hubo Cai, Assistant Professor, hubocai@purdue.edu Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN. 47907-2017, USA Mohamed El-Gafy, Assistant Professor, elgafy@msu.edu Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI 48824-1234, USA ABSTRACT Over the past two decades, several nations have undertaken ambitious plans to minimize the ecological impact of their construction industries by developing and promoting sustainability policies. In this respect, Qatar, a country that is experiencing a substantial growth in its construction industry, has taken significant steps among which was developing its own sustainability rating system (QSAS) that is designed to assess and certify the environmental friendliness and energy efficiency of construction projects. This paper presents a framework, developed and currently being used by the authors, for building an agent-based adoption model that can explain the process and predict the rates of the adoption of sustainability policies in the State of Qatar. The model will enable simulating and evaluating various scenarios by determining the influence of different sets of sustainability policies on fostering the overall adoption patterns and rates. This model will allow decision makers to determine the most appropriate policies that can result in achieving the targeted adoption patterns. Keywords: Agent-based modeling, Sustainable development, Sustainable Construction, Diffusion 1. INTRODUCTION The building sector is notorious worldwide for its heavy consumption of the planet's natural resources. It is recognized as a major contributor to the deterioration of the environment due to the significant amounts of greenhouse gases emitted and waste generated throughout a building life-cycle. To quote just a few figures demonstrating the foregoing statements, it is reported that, in the US, the building sector consumes a whopping 40% of materials extracted every year. It also consumes 30% of all primary energy and creates every year more than 145 million metric tons of waste, which amounts to one-third of the materials landfilled annually (Kibert 2002). Worldwide, the building sector is responsible for emitting around 40% of the greenhouse gases known for their detrimental contribution to the environment (UNEP 2003). In Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries, construction leads to around 25-40% of the final energy consumption (OECD 2003). On the other hand, the situation in non-OECD countries is even worse as the environmental impacts of the building sector can also result in public health issues, especially in urban areas (Melchert 2007). Moreover, the building sector plays a pivotal role in the economies of nations. Its market volume worldwide is estimated at over USD 3 trillion which is around 10% of the GDP of the world. In