A BIM-Enabled Design Method for Green Plantation on Building Sites

摘要

This paper proposes a BIM-enabled method that assists in designing green plantation with a more realistic estimation of CO_2 capture than the current methods. For example. Taiwan's building code provides an evaluation method for estimating the CO_2 capture of green plants. However, this simple manual calculation does not take two key factors into account, i.e., sunlight and plant variety, for CO_2 capture estimation, causing considerable uncertainty of estimated results. Recently, building information modeling (BIM) has emerged as an enabling technology for designers and engineers to make the best use of digital space for simulation of project tasks in advance and management of project information/knowledge. To fulfill the design requirement, the proposed method takes advantage of BIM to enable the sunlight simulation in 3D digital space along with a specialized plant database to help the designers select suitable plants for regions with different sunlight conditions within a building site. This BIM-enabled method is also different from the BIM-based ones that mainly take advantage of BIM to ease the design tasks under the current design paradigm and process.