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Building Information Modeling (BIM) is increasingly used to support green building design practices, yet its alignment with established green building assessment (GBA) tools remains underexamined. This study evaluates the extent to which Autodesk Revit, as a BIM tool, supports the calculation of energy-related indicators in GBA tools such as the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) method. A quasi-empirical, multi-method approach was employed, combining content analysis, a Revit-based simulation of a residential building, and structured evaluation by a panel of four experts. Using both subjective and objective measures, the experts assessed Revit’s effectiveness and the role of Revit’s media channels—modeling, simulation, data integration, and text documentation—in supporting and calculating LEED Energy and Atmosphere (EA) indicators. Results reveal that Revit is capable of effectively supporting 7 out of 11 LEED EA indicators. The highly supported indicators included minimum energy performance, building-level energy metering, optimized energy performance, advanced energy metering, renewable energy production, and enhanced refrigerant management while the fundamental refrigerant management indicator was evaluated as a moderately supported indicator. These highly supported indicators are core energy-related indicators; three of them are prerequisite indicators, while the remaining are credit indicators that cover 66.7% of the weight assigned for the EA indicators. The results also demonstrated that the remaining four indicators—fundamental commissioning and verification, enhanced commissioning, demand response, green power, and carbon offsets—were evaluated as poorly supported by Revit. The consistency of results across two rounds of survey, along with the expert’s consensus on 73% (8 out of 11) of the examined indicators, provides empirical validation of Rivet’s capacity to support LEED GBA. Findings also showed that modeling and simulation, followed by data integration, are the most impactful channels in supporting and calculating LEED EA criteria and requirements, with significant statistical correlation confirmed through Kendall’s Tau correlation. The findings have theoretical and practical implications for designers, green building practitioners, and BIM developers and suggest areas for further research.
Al-Qawasmi et al. (Mon,) studied this question.