Authors
Papakosta, Athina; Kindler, Maciej; Dorrell, Peter
Abstract
Linking cost and carbon impacts of construction projects can enable their management in tandem to monitor and improve environmental sustainability and affordability. The integrated 5D+ process presented hereby has been developed in response to this challenge to provide a collaborative platform for consistent cost and carbon estimation, making use of existing readily available BIM technology. 5D+ is a workflow built around systematically sourcing and organising the necessary information from multiple project work streams to enable robust yet flexible links between them. BIM-based quantity data sit at the core and consistent relationships are created with appropriate information required from various disciplines: environmental, commercial, design, engineering, construction, procurement, etc. for cost & carbon estimating. A process as such is envisaged to foster collaboration between functions that are otherwise typically disconnected, e.g. commercial costing and sustainability teams, to produce useful outputs that feed into decision-making and encourage a holistic project approach. The fundamental technical components of 5D+ will be introduced: BIM management, Bill of Quantities (BoQ), pricing, carbon-related information, data structuring, formats and classification required. Moreover, strategic leadership, roles and responsibilities, dependencies and workflows, procedures & systems to effectively plan, set up and manage 5D+ estimation in a construction project’s ecosystem will be discussed. A key aspect of 5D+ is ‘looser’ information organisation model that consists of integrated workflows generating structured data, rather than attempting to host all the information required under a specific type of software solution, product or file format. Due to the rigour of these data structures, they are all robustly linked to one another. Agility, connectivity and efficiency of the process is therefore enhanced, building on as well as further driving digital transformation.