Optimizing Building Sustainability: A Systematic Review of BIM-Based Decision Support Systems

In light of the climate protection goals of the Paris Agreement, optimizing the sustainability of planning processes is becoming increasingly important. Building Information Modeling (BIM) centralizes planning information for interdisciplinary evaluation, enabling sustainable decision-making. This paper presents a systematic review of BIM-based decision support approaches for building sustainability. Following vom Brocke’s five-phase model and the PRISMA 2020 standard, 70 studies were analyzed to identify current methods, their respective strengths and limitations, and future research needs. The findings reveal a highly dynamic but fragmented field of research. Assessment-Based Optimization and multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) methods dominate. However, the holistic integration of ecological, economic and social indicators remains rare, with social sustainability receiving the least attention. Most approaches rely on proprietary BIM environments, while open BIM applications and interoperable data standards remain underdeveloped. Standardized data sources, such as Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs), are well established for ecological assessments, but are largely lacking for the economic and social dimensions. The review highlights the urgent need for interoperable data formats, standardized evaluation methods, and accessible databases to enable scalable and comparable BIM-based sustainability optimizations. Advancing these foundations will be essential for achieving consistent, holistic sustainability optimization in the construction industry.