Uncertainty, BIM and whole life environmental impacts of building services

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Session 12 Paper 1, Heriot-Watt University Edinburgh, 14-15 April 2016

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The ability to understand uncertainty in building design offers savings in time, cost, quality and environmental impacts, but presents special challenges when considering embodied energy and carbon. The challenges relate particularly to composite building services components. A review of relevant literature suggests that analytical uncertainty propagation (AUP) may in certain conditions have advantages over sampling-based methods for the analysis of initial embodied impacts of composite building services components. A case study shows that the use of AUP combined with parametric prediction could generate realistic estimates of embodied carbon of composite building services components incorporating uncertainty analysis. This approach, if integrated with building information modelling (BIM) could support rapid estimation of whole life energy and carbon impacts of building services systems and components.