# A Systematic Review of the Role of BIM in Building Sustainability Assessment Methods
## 6 Conclusions  
The construction industry is more and more embracing BIM as societies' and authorities' concerns about the negative impacts of buildings are increasing, with new approaches to improve their sustainability being sought. The application of BIM for sustainability purposes can reduce the number of required resources, as well as improve the overall quality of a building. Therefore, less energy will be required, and fewer emissions will be produced. BSA methods are also taking advantage of BIM to foster and automate their assessment procedures. The potential of BIM lies in information share among the involved stakeholders and on process efficiency, significantly reducing the necessary time to perform a sustainability assessment. BIM also provides designers with detailed information to compare the impacts of different sustainable solutions and to assess the sustainability of their buildings since the project early stages. Figure 12: Number of LEED, BREEAM and SBTool criteria that is possible to assess with BIM. The analysis made in this study has identified that, currently, the BIM method is mostly used to assess LEED sustainability criteria (22 out of 26 studies). With regard to the BSA categories, globally, energy-related and material-related categories have been attended to in 50% of the studies. Site-related categories have been addressed in 42% and indoor environment-related categories in 35%. Concerning the software, overall, Autodesk Revit was commonly used by researchers, adopted in 81% of the identified articles, followed by Microsoft Excel (27%). This happens due to the Autodesk Revit capacity to create, edit and export/import BIM models. Autodesk Revit is also frequently used when specific API is required or to gather quantitative data from the model. Regarding journals, a pattern was not completely identified. Nevertheless, _Automation in Construction_ has provided 23% of the papers for this research. _Conference Proceedings_ have provided 15% of the publications, and the _Journal of Architectural Computing_ and _Journal of Cleaner Production_ have both provided 7,8%. The remaining publications came from several different journals. Overall, at least 67% of the LEED criteria and 24% of BREEAM criteria can currently be assessed with BIM. According to the analysis, a theoretical proposal aims to reach a 98% assessment of the SBTool criteria using BIM. At the moment, only 68% is already practically validated. Nevertheless, facing the current BIM integration on the three schemes, SBTool has a great attractiveness potential. It can evaluate the same (or more) criteria than LEED and BREEAM, on identical related categories (energy, materials, site and indoor environment). Additionally, only by using Autodesk Revit and Microsoft Excel, it is possible to support the assessment of 48% of the SBTool criteria. It constitutes a comprehensive basis for the designer's decision-making since the earlier design stages. Currently, despite the increased use of BIM to assess BSA methods, there is still a knowledge gap between them. BIM is not yet properly oriented towards sustainable building. As BSA methods are based on multi-disciplinary information, there is still a need to use several different BIM tools. Interoperability problems are also commonly found, requiring time for model checking. Moreover, there is a need to create common procedures and standards to support designers in performing a BSA with BIM. Procedures must be established and validated, so designers could achieve reliable and comparable results. BSA developers are also aware of this paradigm and are continually developing new strategies to integrate BIM into their systems. All the studied methods already have conceptual or developed frameworks, which can be embedded in the BIM workflow, to improve and speed up the assessment procedures. Thus, BSA can be easier articulated with all the other project disciplines, improving information-sharing.