IMPACT - Computational whole-building life cycle assessment and life cycle costing

IMPACT is a specification and database for software developers to enable the production of software tools that carry out consistent Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) and Life Cycle Costing (LCC). IES, who are a partner in the consortium funded by the Technology Strategy Board to develop IMPACT, will be the first to release IMPACT compliant software tools. Other developers will be able to develop and release IMPACT tools later on.
IMPACT is based around interoperable Building Information Modelling (BIM) where the user attributes sharable information to drawn or scheduled entities, in this case environmental and cost information. This may be done as a ‘check’ at particular stages in design development or iteratively as part of the user’s general workflow. Put simply, IMPACT measures the quantity information in the BIM and multiplies this with environmental impact and cost ‘rates’ to produce an overall impact and cost for the whole or a selected part of the design. Fundamentally, the results generated allow the user to identify aspects of the design where cost and environmental ‘savings’ can be made. In addition, overall results for designs are comparable to assess performance.