Date of Award

9-14-2022

Publication Type

Thesis

Degree Name

M.A.Sc.

Department

Civil and Environmental Engineering

Keywords

Building information modelling;Infrastructure;Sustainable procurement;Water supply

Supervisor

Rajeev Ruparathna

Abstract

Although water supply infrastructure is a vital component of community infrastructure systems, significant environmental, social, and economic impacts are created throughout its life cycle. Previous researchers have identified sustainable construction procurement as a viable method to enhance the Triple Bottom Line (TBL) performance of construction projects. Adopting sustainable procurement in water supply infrastructure projects has been overlooked primarily due to the lack of quantified environmental and social impact data. Environmental Product Declaration (EPDs), and Social Life Cycle Assessment (S-LCA) have the potential to address the above data challenge. Furthermore, there is a paradigm shift in adopting Building Information Modelling (BIM) in the construction sector, enabling more access to project data. Hence, BIM can be used as a platform to link EPDs, social impact data, and cost data for proposal evaluations. Despite the potential benefits of the above approach, there is an implementation challenge in fidelity of EPD data. A comprehensive review revealed that previous researchers have overlooked TBL-based bid proposal evaluations for water supply infrastructure projects. The vision of this research is to adopt BIM and sustainable procurement to enhance the delivery of water supply infrastructure projects. This research developed a BIM-based plugin toolkit to conduct an automated TBL-based project proposal evaluation. Furthermore, state-of-the-art implementation support tool for EPDs was developed to support BIM-based sustainable construction procurement. Lastly, a Bayesian Belief Network (BBN) model was developed to evaluate the success of BIM-based construction procurement in the Canadian construction industry. The study revealed that, BIM-based sustainable procurement assists decision-makers in identifying the project proposal with the superior sustainability performance. However, implementation resources and client leadership are required to successfully implement BIM-based procurement in the Canadian construction sector. This research benefits the construction industry and policymakers in enhancing the sustainability of construction procurement. Furthermore, outcomes this research promotes the BIM adaptation in the Canadian construction sector.

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