As climate change concerns increase, more and more clients are aiming for higher sustainability ratings for their properties. Green building assessments are of great importance to stimulate the sustainable paradigm shift within the Architecture, Engineering and Construction industry. However, the current working process for green building assessments, such as for BREEAM-NL certification, still requires tedious manual work. The application of Building Information Modeling provides an opportunity for automated assessments and real-time feedback. Despite the significant amount of research on technological possibilities of BIM-based sustainability compliance verification, this is not a commonly adopted BIM application. This thesis project aims to address this research gap, by taking a closer look into practice to identify the barriers that are hindering the adoption of BIM for BREEAM-NL assessments and proposing a strategy to further the utilization of BIM for this purpose. The primary contributions of this research lie in the following areas: 1) Investigating the actual status of BIM use for BREEAM-NL assessments in practice and discussing the needs of the industry 2) Integrating the topics of process and policy along with technology in the discussion of BIM-based Green Building Assessments and lastly, 3) Providing a practical strategy to initiate the implementation of BIM-based BREEAM-NL assessments.

The Paris Agreement requires building retrofitting practices to be more efficient and effective. However, the current practice for building energy retrofitting is lacking behind, and one reason for that is the time-consuming process of energy credit evaluation. Energy performance assessment such as BREEAM-NL in the Netherlands could apply a more automatic approach with the help of building information modelling (BIM) for an efficient building energy retrofitting evaluation process. However, to what extent BIM can help in accelerating energy performance evaluation in the BREEAM-NL certification process is under-examined. This paper first combines literature findings with practical interviews from a case study organization to present a holistic overview of the potential for automating energy-related credits evaluation in BREEAM-NL using BIM. To understand the possible impacts of such transition, a responsible, accountable, consulted, and informed (RACI) matrix is developed to map the impacts on different actors involved. Furthermore, to help practitioners in an organizational context to adopt a BIM-enabled energy credits assessment workflow, the case study organization is studied to (1) understand their current BIM use status; (2) propose a suitable starting point to take toward a BIM-enabled energy performance assessment for building energy retrofitting. Finally, the proposed starting point is demonstrated using a customized application, and the project team’s feedback is used to verify its efficiency and future directions are identified.