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Buildings are among the biggest contributors to environmental impacts. To achieve energy-saving and decarbonisation objectives while also improving living conditions, it is imperative to undertake large-scale renovations of existing buildings, which constitute the greater part of building stock and have relatively low energy efficiency. However, building renovation projects poses significant challenges owing to the absence of optimised tools and methods for planning and executing renovation works, coupled with the need for a high degree of interaction with occupants.

This paper describes the development of an automated process, based on building information modelling (BIM) and the principal component analysis method, for overcoming building renovation challenges. The process involves the assessment and simulation of renovation scenarios in terms of duration, cost, effort needed and disruptive potential. The proposed process was tested in three case studies; multi-residence apartment buildings comprising different construction components and systems, located in Greece, France and Denmark, on which six different renovation strategies were evaluated using sensitivity analysis.

The developed tool was successfully able to model and simulate the six renovation scenarios across the three demonstration sites. The ability to simulate various renovation scenarios for a given project can help to strategise renovation interventions based on selected key performance indicators as well as their correlation at two different levels: the building level and the renovated surface area level.

The objectives of this paper are twofold: firstly, to present an automated process, using BIM, for evaluating and comparing renovation scenarios in terms of duration, cost, workers needed and disruptive potential; next, to show the subsequent testing of the process and the analysis of its applicability and behaviour when applied on three live demonstration sites located in three different European countries (France, Greece and Denmark), involving six renovation scenarios.

Whole building life cycle assessment (WBLCA) is a key methodology to reduce the environmental impacts in the building sector. Research studies usually face challenges in presenting comprehensive LCA results due to the complexity of assessments at the building level. There is a dearth of methods for the systematic evaluation and optimization of the WBLCA performance at the design stage. The study aims to develop a design optimization framework based on the proposed WBLCA method to evaluate and improve the environmental performance at the building level.

The WBLCA development method is proposed with detailed processes based on the EN 15978 standard. The environmental product declaration (EPD) methods were adopted to ensure the WBLCA is comprehensive and reliable. Building information modeling (BIM) was used to ensure the building materials and assembly contributions are accurate and provide dynamic material updates for the design optimization framework. Furthermore, the interactive BIM-LCA calculation processes were demonstrated for measuring the environmental impacts of design upgrades. The TOPSIS-based LCA results normalization was selected to conduct the comparisons of various building design upgrades.

The case study conducted for a residential building showed that the material embodied impacts and the operational energy use impacts are the two critical factors that contribute 60–90% of the total environmental impacts and resource uses. Concrete and wood are the main material types accounting for an average of 65% of the material embodied impacts. The air and water heating for the house are the main energy factors, as these account for over 80% of the operational energy use. Based on the original WBLCA results, two scenarios were established to improve building performance through the design optimization framework.

The LCA results show that the two upgraded building designs create an average of 5% reduction compared with the original building design and improving the thermal performance of the house with more insulation materials does not always reduce the WBLCA results. The proposed WBLCA method can be used to compare the building-level environmental performances with the similar building types. The proposed framework can be used to support building designers to effectively improve the WBLCA performance.

This paper aims to present a highly accessible and affordable tracking model for earthmoving operations in an attempt to overcome some of the limitations of current tracking models.

The proposed methodology involves four main processes: acquiring onsite terrestrial images, processing the images into 3D scaled cloud data, extracting volumetric measurements and crew productivity estimations from multiple point clouds using Delaunay triangulation and conducting earned value/schedule analysis and forecasting the remaining scope of work based on the estimated performance. For validation, the tracking model was compared with an observation-based tracking approach for a backfilling site. It was also used for tracking a coarse base aggregate inventory for a road construction project.

The presented model has proved to be a practical and accurate tracking approach that algorithmically estimates and forecasts all performance parameters from the captured data.

The proposed model is unique in extracting accurate volumetric measurements directly from multiple point clouds in a developed code using Delaunay triangulation instead of extracting them from textured models in modelling software which is neither automated nor time-effective. Furthermore, the presented model uses a self-calibration approach aiming to eliminate the pre-calibration procedure required before image capturing for each camera intended to be used. Thus, any worker onsite can directly capture the required images with an easily accessible camera (e.g. handheld camera or a smartphone) and can be sent to any processing device via e-mail, cloud-based storage or any communication application (e.g. WhatsApp).