A digital solution for unlocking the urban mining potential of the residential building stock through the integration of BIM and GIS

Abstract

The construction industry consumes up to half of the excavated primary resources and generates one-third of total waste annually, impacting the environment and society. To reduce this impact, maintaining the primary resources in some form within the economy as long as possible is essential. One of the ways to do this would be to recover waste products and cycle them back into the economy as a secondary resource, either through reusing or recycling. This implies carefully planned waste recovery strategies based on the knowledge of the materials embedded in constructions. The solutions that encourage data transparency and increase the availability of data on this knowledge to all potential stakeholders across many industries could contribute to creating more effective strategies. Digital technologies are the primary tool in the development of such solutions. Integrating Building Information Modelling (BIM) and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) provides the power to achieve this. The main objective of this paper is to develop and validate a digital solution that compiles, systematizes and represents the buildings’ material inventory data at the municipal level. To this end, a three-step methodological framework was introduced: (1) development of BIMs for the existing building stock; (2) allocation of material inventory data to BIMs; and (3) integration of a digital solution into 3D GIS. A residential building in one of the central municipalities of Belgrade, Serbia, was selected as a case study to evaluate the proposed concept. The BIM model was reconstructed from aerial and terrestrial scans (Scan-to BIM), and its semantic enrichment with the data on building type, construction period, type of built-in materials, their service lives and material quantities acquired from several publicly available sources. When fully implemented at the urban scale level and validated in the interaction with public administration, NGOs from the housing sector and end-users, the platform could be a valuable tool which may maximize the circular potential of each material embedded in buildings and help in more effective policymaking and could be used for benchmarking and progress tracking of achieving strategic goals set within these policies.