The potential of graph theories to assess buildings’ disassembly and components’ reuse: How building information modelling (BIM) and social network analysis (SNA) metrics might help Design for Disassembly (DfD)?

Nowadays, buildings consist in an assembly of several components and systems allowing them to fit the users’ technical, functional and comfort needs. In eneral, buildings’ systemsand components are rather integrated into each-other and therefore, rather difficult to maintain, repair, update or dismantle separately, leading to precocious obsolescence and waste.
Design for Change (DfC) and Design for Disassembly (DfD) approaches aim at a reduction of waste by designing buildings enabling reuse of their components, elements and materials. To do so, one key aspect is the interface between buildings’ components. Indeed, depending on the connection type (reversible, non-reversible), their accessibility and assembly sequence, buildings’ ease of dismantling may differ drastically. Today, approaches such as the relational pattern method, propose to map components’ interactions through nodes and edges representing respectively components and connections. Although a network is defined within the framework of this method, it appears that the networks are mainly used as visual support for the assessor, allowing him to qualify components’ interactions. This paper explores the potential of graph theories in general, and social network analysis to characterise buildings’ networks.
To do so, comparisons between DfD concepts and graph theory metrics will be investigated to show the main similarities, differences and opportunities. Furthermore, a discussion showing the specific interest of social network for DfD will be developed. Finally, the implementation and testing of those propositions into an automated Building Information Modelling (BIM) tool will prove the potential, limitations and opportunities of such approach. In conclusion, this research proposes to use state-of-the art knowledge of other fields related
to data management and network analytics to be able to characterize and assess disassembly and therefore, will allow designers to reduce waste and increase buildings’ reuse of components.