Modeling the Environmental Impact of Sustainability Policies in the Construction Industry Using Agent Based Simulation and Life Cycle Analysis

Abstract

The construction industry, with its long supply chain and long lifetime of projects, is blamed to be one of the main contributors to environmental concerns including accelerated resource consumption and harmful emissions. Industry stakeholders, including developers, designers, contractors and suppliers, are, therefore, continuing to explore different options to reduce this impact. Various approaches have been adopted in different countries with building rating systems like the Leadership in Energy & Environmental Design (LEED) certification program being the most common way reflecting stakeholders’ efforts to go green. Governments and concerned authorities at national and state levels are expected to foster the trend of sustainable construction by motivating these stakeholders and pursuing policies that would help the green momentum. However, decision makers at such governmental and state levels face a challenge of prioritizing the policies and regulations that should be imposed. The objective of this paper is to present the development of a framework of an Agent Based Model (ABM) that simulates the effect of different possible policies in the construction market using Life Cycle Analysis (LCA), which is to be used by decision makers to assess and prioritize different policies or combination of policies. The framework was developed using Anylogic software and a sample construction market from the state of Qatar was used as an example for implementing the proposed framework. Results of running the model on this sample market illustrate the effectiveness of using this ABM as a support tool for decision makers in the area of sustainable construction.