Building Products Specifications of Tomorrow

One can not but pity those who resist an evidently overwhelming and inevitable change. It was not the first time that one of the audience at a professional meeting questioned if Building Information Modelling was really so widespread among Swedish construction firms that other actors should alter their routines accordingly. It was nevertheless less unexpected to hear such comments this time, since the session was mainly about the future of provision of building material specification.

Lecturers presented results of a preliminary survey carried out by the association for building material industries (Byggmaterialindustrierna) and financed by SBUF, SIVL, and WSP. The topic was how currently prevailing BVD (byggvarodeklaration) format should be enhanced so as to keep up with global developments in building information exchange and environmental evaluation policies. At an international level, concepts such as EPD (Environmental Product Declaration) and PCR (Product Category Rules) are gaining more popularity and being deployed more frequently by manufacturers for providing LCA-inclusive specifications of their products. 

However, ambiguities about which concepts to be used and how to interpret the terminology of each concept are escalated even further by the variety of applications that could be conceived for it: from Life Cycle Analysis of the building as a whole, through evaluation against building's environmental performance certification systems such as LEED, BREEAM, Miljöbyggnad, etc. to examination of social aspect of sustainability in construction.

Among the three categories of respondents to the questionnaires i.e suppliers, contractors, and property owners, the first group seemed to be the most negative to more widespread and obligatory supply of information on building products in digital formats; which sounds rational, since suppliers are the ones who should take the greatest endeavors for this purpose. Moreover, people quite often express their concern about how fair the venture is considering the fact that those who do not participate probably stay on the safer side.

It was concluded in the report that voluntary declaration of building products information without any auditing by some third party was still preferred, whereas provision of an improved template and more instruction were recommended. There was no final say in the report about whether to continue using separate databases or devising a central repository for accumulating information over time. A suggestion raised by one of the audience was though allowing use of own databases while leveraging and promoting a common approved standard format. The necessity for adopting digital formats and relinquishing all paper forms and hard-coded formats such as PDF was also highly emphasized.

The dominant theme of the talks after the pause was the urge for benefiting from the capabilities realized by BIM technologies for automation and acceleration of building information acquisition and exchange. This will facilitate swiftly executing realistic evaluation of multiple design alternatives and automated environmental certification of buildings at later stages. There are nevertheless a number of issues in the field to be tackled such as whether to use XML or IFC as the standard building information modeling format or how to converge the two separate areas of GIS and BIM.

This diagram demonstrates how BIM-based building product specifications helps realistic environmental evaluation of design alternatives and automated environmental certification of buildings (Image courtesy of WSP Environmental)