A Building Products Procurement Platform

A while ago, a multi-disciplinary project was initiated at our collaboration lab by scholars from three departments of the School of Architecture and Built Environment (ABE) at KTH: Real Estate and Construction Management, Civil and Environmental Engineering and Urban Planning and Environment.

This work provides the basis for developing a building products procurement platform for environmental evaluation of design alternatives. The outcome is a ground for implementing existing tools and standards for lifecycle assessment or environmental certification of buildings in the early building design stage.

To realize this, the first phase of the Life-cycle-support Building product Indexing Platform (Lcs-BIP) project was accomplished for a specific use case, procurement, and the corresponding work-flow scheme was depicted. The federated solution introduced for environmental evaluation of design alternatives is composed of prototypes of a web-based tool for procurement of building products and materials (BuildX), coupled with a BIM-enabled platform and data sharing hub (Share-A-space). The system assists users to maintain a trifold focus on competitive price, quality, and environmental performance of the building. The overall workflow of the system was clarified through an exemplar scenario with the three disciplinary roles of an architect, a BIM administrator and a contractor.

I will present the outcomes as a poster (see below) next week at the World SB14 Barcelona Conference. This exemplar approach could be complemented with high-end solutions for BIM-based product libraries so as to provide the design and construction team with maximum flexibility and required knowledge for balancing environmental, economical and functional measures in their proposed design alternatives.