A recent peer-reviewed study in Building & Environment offers a timely reality check for professionals relying on BIM for life-cycle assessments (LCA). While digital workflows promise automation and insight, the research confirms what many practitioners already experience: most tools don’t go far enough. The result? Gaps, delays, and missed opportunities for better building decisions.
But there’s a solution—and it’s already integrated into Archicad.
Published in May 2025, the review titled BIM-Based Life-Cycle Assessment: A Systematic Review on Automation and Data Exchange surveys over a decade of research and tool development across BIM-LCA solutions, focusing on data interoperability and automation. The takeaway is clear: progress has been made, but key limitations still hinder project efficiency.
Let’s unpack three of the report’s main findings—and why they matter for daily work.
“BIM-LCA integration enables automated quantity take-off, supporting faster evaluation of different design options and decision-making.”
— Building & Environment, 2025
The good news? Many tools now automate the first step: extracting quantities from BIM. That’s no small feat, and it has helped speed up early-stage assessments.
But most workflows stop there. Once the quantities are out, you’re back in spreadsheet territory. You map materials manually, juggle separate tools, and any design change means starting over or, worse, skipping updates to save time.
This breaks the promise of BIM. It fragments the process and creates risk—incorrect data, outdated results, and missed insights.
Anavitor LCA closes the loop. It pulls quantities from Archicad, map them to environmental data, either generic or specific Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs), and write LCA results back into the BIM model. No more exporting, importing, or re-keying. You stay inside Archicad, and the data stays synced.
“Several challenges remain, including manual BIM-LCA data mapping during LCIA and limited research on … dynamic data exchange for OpenBIM [and] standardised LOD for different LCA applications.”
— Building & Environment, 2025
Despite the growing use of OpenBIM, the study finds that dynamic data exchange is still rare. Most tools don’t write anything back into the model. And there’s little agreement on how detailed models should be for different types of LCA.
This matters. Without feedback into the BIM, there’s no easy way to see how changes affect impact. Without standardized detail levels, you risk either overmodeling or underdelivering.
With Anavitor LCA’s Archicad plug-in, impact data is visual and contextual. Carbon intensity and quantities are embedded in each object—walls, slabs, roofs—so architects and engineers can see the consequences of their choices in real time. The plug-in also supports staged LCA, matching the appropriate level of detail to each project phase.
“Decision-making methods are mainly absent from BIM-LCA tools.”
— Building & Environment, 2025
The final gap the study highlights is perhaps the most important. Even when LCA results are available, most tools don’t help users weigh them against other factors—function, aesthetics, or compliance. In other words, data exists, but decisions still happen offline.
Architects can use Archicad tools together with Anavitor LCA data and create visualizations and compare different solutions.
If you’re an architect or consultant, time is tight. Clients want sustainable options, but no one has hours to wrestle with multiple tools, translate formats, or verify data line by line.
Manual BIM-LCA workflows cost you time. They increase the risk of outdated or incorrect results. They limit what you can test, which means fewer options for your clients—and less leverage in design decisions.
They also lock insights inside files that don’t travel well. Contractors and owners rarely see the full picture.
Anavitor LCA changes that. You get real-time feedback in the model, synced with up-to-date EPDs. You test more options, faster. You explain trade-offs visually. And your LCA doesn’t die in a PDF—it lives in the BIM.
You don’t need to change how you design. You just need a smarter way to assess impact while you do it.
Anavitor LCA is available as an Archicad add-on in Norway, Sweden, and Finland. It supports both concept-phase and detailed LCAs, including NS 3720 and EU taxonomy reporting.
No more broken links between data and design. With Anavitor LCA, it all connects.
Source:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0360132325007280