Starting point 

How can historic AEC data be leveraged to achieve more sustainable and efficient future projects? 

This topic may include consideration of: how ‘wicked’ design goals might be established in building projects around resource consumption, waste production, carbon emissions, time, budget, and benefit objectives; how past project performance might be evaluated within these goals; identifying who should be setting new, sustainability-focused future goals and how to enable them; and ensuring quality assurance in shared architectural models. 

Project Summary 

Existing buildings hold large stocks of structural components — beams, columns, and slabs — that could be reused, yet reuse rarely happens. The barrier is increasingly informational rather than material: the data needed to judge whether a component is worth recovering is fragmented across disciplines, often incomplete, and poorly maintained over a building’s life. This research asks what kind of data model can consistently capture, organise, and maintain material-reuse information for structural components in existing buildings throughout their life cycle. Rather than deciding whether a component can be reused — a judgement that ultimately requires on-site survey and physical testing — it focuses on connecting external records (material composition, maintenance and inspection history, and ownership) to individual components’ information from IFC in a hybrid machine-readable structure. The framework is developed and tested on a real adaptive-reuse building using an Action Design Research approach. 

Objectives 

1. Review existing BIM/IFC-based approaches and identify gaps in representing reuse-relevant information for structural components. 

2. Define an attribute template specifying which characteristics matter for structural-component reuse decisions. 

3. Design an integration layer linking four data sources — material composition, components information and relationships, maintenance/inspection records, and ownership — to individual components in a machine-readable format. 

4. Represent the integrated data in a hybrid structure — a knowledge graph capturing inter-component connections (for disassembly assessment), coupled with tabular/relational records holding each component’s attributes: material, dimensions, condition, location, and ownership. 

5. Develop a screening interface that retrieves a component’s linked information to support a first-step reuse assessment. 

6. Propose strategies for maintaining and updating component information across the building life cycle. 

Expected Outcomes 

1. A component-reuse attribute template — a structured account of the attributes needed to describe structural components for reuse decisions. 

2. An integration layer (the core contribution) — organising fragmented, multi-source records into one machine-readable structure linked to individual components. 

3. A component-reuse query layer — a web-based screening interface (knowledge graph + relational database) enabling first-step evaluation and retrieval of component information.