A Comprehensive Overview of Software Programs for Green Building Design

Abstract

Buildings are energy gluttons and produce a large portion of the total green house gas emissions, air pollutants, and solid wastes. Against the background of the predominant contribution of buildings to the global climate change and other energy-related environmental issues, much effort have been made to develop appropriate software programs for a better building design with respect to environmental performance. However, in practice, it is natural for designers to ask the following two questions. First, how to select from the available programs for the design tasks in hand? Second, what improvements can be made for the current programs in order to better suit them with practical requirements? With the above two questions, an overview of the programs for green building design is presented in this paper. Due to the large number of programs falling into the scope of this study, a classification system was established to group the available programs into several categories for discussion. A few representative programs for each category were selected and briefly discussed with emphasis on their pros and cons. On the basis of the programs’ analysis, a model is proposed at the end of this paper to hopefully address the drawbacks of most programs for green building design.

Keywords:

• Green building
• Overview
• Software
• Life-Cycle Assessment
• Environmental impact