Digital Urban Mining Platform for assessing the material composition of building stocks through coupling of BIM to GIS

Project Description

The AEC (architecture, engineering and construction) industry is responsible for 60% of the extracted raw materials. In Austria, the AEC sector is responsible for 70% of total annual waste – facts that are underlining the importance of implementing recycling strategies. The building stock has great potential to serve as raw material reservoir, however currently there is a lack of comprehensive knowledge about the actual building stock, which is the largest obstacle for reusing and recycling of materials and elements.

The main goal of BIMstocks is to develop a method for a consistent digital documentation of the material composition of the existing building stock for modeling the secondary raw materials cadaster and prediction of the recycling potential, by creating a catalogue of BIM-Objects of typically Viennese buildings and follow-up generation of as-built BIM-Models, thus enabling an upscaling to city level.

The innovation of the project is the coupling of different technologies, which enable upscaling from component-level to city-level: scanning technology using GPR, application of machine learning for the automated determination of material compositions, and predictive modelling at city-level in the digital urban mining platform.
The main use of the obtained results from BIMstocks is the increase of recycling rates by applying urban mining strategies, for which the generated public urban mining platform serves as a basis.