The "ecologue" Approach to Computational Building Life Cycle Analysis

Construction and operation of buildings is internationally a major cause of resource depletion and environmental pollution. Computational performance evaluation tools could support the decision making process in the area of environmentally responsive building design and play an important role in environmental impact assessment, especially when a life cycle assessment (LCA) approach is used. LCA requires extensive data collection for each relevant component or process within the boundaries of the assessment. The typical building contains many products from different manufacturers which are assembled in ways often unique to an individual building. For comprehensive environmental impact analysis to be realized in a computational support tool for the building design domain, such tools must a) have an analysis method that considers the life cycle of building construction, operation, and decommissioning, b) have a representation that is able to accommodate the data and computability requirements of the analysis method and the analysis tool and c) be seamlessly integrated within a multiaspect design analysis environment that can provide data on environmentally relevant building operation criteria. This paper describes the implementation of an application (ECOLOGUE) for comprehensive computational assessment of environmental impact indicators over the building life cycle. The application is embedded in a multi-aspect spacebased building design and evaluation environment (SEMPER). The paper demonstrates the use and results of the ECOLOGUE system via illustrative examples.