Understanding its phases and Economic Challenges
From Design to Deconstruction
The Building Life Cycle (BLC) analyse is one of the fundamental pillars of BIM. Its purpose is to ensure digital continuity from design to deconstruction, integrating the Life Cycle Costing (LCC) dimension as a key performance indicator throughout the building’s existence. This systemic approach goes beyond describing project stages: it interconnects the technical, organizational, and economic dimensions of the built asset to guarantee coherence and sustainable performance.
BIM and Digital Continuity in the BLC
Within this dynamic, BIM plays a central role. By establishing digital continuity between project phases, it creates a collaborative data environment where all stakeholders share, enrich, and manage project information. This interoperability strengthens coordination among disciplines, improves the quality of exchanged data, and enables tracking of a building’s value and performance across its entire life cycle.
From an Asset Management perspective, this digital thread forms the foundation of a sustainable management strategy. The data produced in each phase feed into the next, creating a digital memory of the building. The performance of an asset no longer depends solely on its technical attributes but also on the reliability and traceability of its data.
Each decision made at one stage affects the next: the choice of materials, energy systems, or construction methods impacts maintenance costs, energy consumption, and the potential for reuse at the end of life.
Design Phase: Anticipating Sustainable Performance
The design phase marks the starting point of the BLC and concentrates most of the project’s structuring decisions. Although it represents only around 5% of the total cost, it determines up to 75% of future operation and maintenance expenses (APOGÉE, 2006). Choices made at this stage — from morphology and materials to maintenance or reuse strategies — define both durability and economic performance.
Through 3D modeling, parametric simulation, and multi-criteria analysis, BIM makes it possible to evaluate the consequences of each technical option on future costs, energy consumption, and operation scenarios. Design thus becomes the first lever of performance optimization, where technical decisions become economic ones.
Construction Phase: Materializing Digital Continuity
The construction phase translates design intentions into a physical asset. Representing around 20% of the total life-cycle cost, it involves major expenditures on structure, equipment, and commissioning. However, its real value lies in the quality of data transfer to the operation phase.
BIM ensures interdisciplinary coordination, 4D/5D planning, and document management, aligning the design model with the digital as-built documentation (DOE). This digital DOE becomes the technical memory of the building — the foundation of all future maintenance operations.
Operation and Maintenance: Data-Driven Performance
The operation and maintenance phase is the longest and most resource-intensive stage of the life cycle, accounting for nearly 75% of total costs. It includes technical management, comfort, safety, and energy performance activities — where the benefits of rigorous design and construction are finally realized.
Modern Facility Management relies on CMMS (Computerized Maintenance Management System), BMS (Building Management System), and Digital Twins to shift from reactive to predictive maintenance. BIM data feed these systems to anticipate failures, plan interventions, and optimize energy consumption, extending asset longevity and reducing operational costs.
Deconstruction Phase: Closing the Circular Loop
The deconstruction phase now integrates into a broader circular economy logic. With the AGEC Law (2020) and Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR, 2023) in France, the End Life buildings has become a regulatory and environmental challenge.
BIM supports this transition by embedding data on materials, their composition, and reuse potential right from the design stage. The digital model becomes a resource database, identifying reusable elements and minimizing demolition waste — transforming the building into a material and data repository that contributes to carbon neutrality.
LCC: The Economic Framework
According to ISO 15686-5:2017, the LCC method complements life-cycle management with an economic perspective, distinguishing between CAPEX (CapitalExpenditure), OPEX (Operational Expenditure), and EOL (End-of-Life) costs.
Instead of isolating these expenditures, LCC links them across all project phases to evaluate the overall profitability of technical and organizational decisions. Integrated into BIM, LCC enables the simulation of multiple long-term financial scenarios, where each BIM parameter (material, equipment, lifespan, maintenance frequency) becomes a financial input.
Toward Data-Driven and Sustainable Buildings
The combined use of BIM, Life Cycle Thinking, and LCC transforms the way buildings are designed, built, and managed. It establishes both information and economic continuity, linking every current decision to its future impact.
Buildings are no longer static objects but dynamic data-driven systems where technical, environmental, and financial performance align in a sustainable balance. This integration marks the transition from the building-as-object to the building-as-process — measurable, adaptive, and economically responsible.
Key Takeaways
Updated: October 2025
