With the contemporary improvements in construction IT, the use of building information modelling (BIM) has become a considered approach in construction transactions. This places demand on BIM to become fully matured and all-encompassing with respect to operations of various professional platforms and the performance measure of artefacts. Sustainability is one such measure associated with buildings. For the structural engineer, recent design criteria have put great emphasis on the sustainability credentials as part of the traditional criteria of structural integrity, constructability and cost. As such a means for assessing the sustainability credentials of design solutions to guide early design decisions has become a necessity. There exists decision-support tools to aid sustainability assessment of buildings; however, these tools will be more beneficial when built into the design solution from its inception. This paper highlights existing deficiencies and examines how contemporary modelling techniques can be employed to tackle identified gaps. The work proposes a prototype system for appraising the sustainability of design options at the conceptual design stage. The system is based on a framework which uses life cycle costing as a measure of accounting for economic sustainability and a combination of carbon and ecological footprint for the environment. It is implemented in C#, using .NET Frameworks and Revit API. This paper demonstrates that the utilized information modeling representations - in the form of a process model, implementation algorithms and object-based instantiations - can capture sustainability related information to inform decisions at the early stages of the structural design process.
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