An approach integrating geographic information system and building information modelling to assess the building health of commercial buildings

Abstract

The building health has become an increasingly popular topic in recent years, as the health of a building is directly related to the safety and health of the users. A scientific evaluation of building health can help to assess building health issues and to avoid the catastrophic consequences of the building system failure. Although there are some building health evaluation methods for public buildings and residential buildings, there is a lack of approach for assessing the building health of commercial buildings. The study aims to propose an innovative and practical approach to evaluate the building health of commercial buildings by integrating the analytic hierarchy process (AHP), geographic information system (GIS), and building information modelling (BIM). Based on the AHP approach, the building health evaluation model is proposed to consider five aspects, including comfort performance (weight 5.15%), safety performance (weight 51.88%), environmental performance (weight 24.92%), operation management (weight 12.56%), and economic performance (weight 6.49%). It suggests that safety performance should be considered the most important factor in building health evaluation. Besides, a commercial project in Shenzhen, China was selected as a case study to validate the feasibility of the proposed evaluation model. Based on the results, the building health of the study case is scored as 6.9654 out of 10, which is ranked as intermediate. To be specific, the comfort performance scored 0.4515, safety performance scored 3.3344, environmental performance scored 2.2308, operation management scored 0.9019, and the economic performance scored 0.0972. Many recommendations have been made to improve the building health performance of the building, for instance, it recommends to reduce the energy consumption of the building to improve the economic performance of the building and the operation management performance. The developed model can help the governmental department regarding the building sector and asset manager to identify the building’s health performance and take further actions.