Sustainability Assessment for Road Construction Projects

Sustainability Is Difficult to Measure and Compare

Sustainability is difficult to quantify in the construction and infrastructure sectors. The relevant data is scattered across various sources, such as Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs), BIM models (IFC), or bid documents. Proprietary developments are not publicly accessible. The data is structured differently and is difficult to compare.

Clients need to evaluate bids fairly and transparently without having to navigate complex raw data, while considering environmental, economic, and social aspects together.

Expert Evaluation and Technical Implementation Go Hand in Hand

Within the consortium, Kruso is responsible for integrating the different project components, from the initial concept and development of the digital platform to its AI capabilities. The technical sustainability assessment was defined in collaboration with experts and research staff. The AI assists with analysis, comparison, and explanation, without replacing the technical assessment.

Modular Architecture with BIM, EPD, and AI Services

The platform is built on a modular architecture that separates core business logic, interfaces and data access, making it easy to extend:

• Backend as a Spring Boot application, running in a Docker container and hosted in the cloud

• MongoDB as the database for projects, quotes, and evaluation data

• BIM and IFC pipeline: Uploading an IFC model generates versioned submodels; these are displayed via an embedded 3D viewer

• EPD Matcher as a standalone processing service that identifies Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs) matching a specific building component or material, including confidence scores

• AI integration via an interchangeable language model (Retrieval-Augmented Generation): The logged-in user’s data is passed as context based on role and session— without vendor lock-in

• Role- and permission-based data access: Clients and contractors each see only their own projects and quotes

A Sustainability Calculator Covering Three Dimensions

SusInfra consolidates dispersed data on a digital platform and translates it into transparent assessments. At its core is a sustainability calculator that evaluates proposals across three dimensions, environmental, economic, and social, and allows the client to set the weightings.

An Overview of the Key Features

The focus is on a sustainability assessment across three dimensions, environmental, economic, and social, with the Tendering Authority determining the weighting of each. Based on this assessment, projects and proposals for infrastructure initiatives, such as asphalt and concrete roads, can be created, copied, searched, and compared, each with a detailed status indicator.

The necessary environmental data is provided by an EPD matcher, which assigns the appropriate declarations or, alternatively, allows for manually entered values; uploaded IFC models are displayed via an integrated BIM viewer.

An AI assistant based on Retrieval-Augmented Generation accesses the logged-in competitor data on a session-based and role-specific basis; at the same time, it has access to the system’s internal knowledge base and can thus generate recommendations for the bidder. The AI-supported system also makes these recommendations available for the subsequent, automated generation of results reports: The report contains all information provided by the Competitor, the AI-supported recommendations for action, and the system’s calculated evaluation of the bid variant.

Based on this, the Participant of the tender can further improve their bid by submitting additional bid variants for the same request for proposals. For the bid variant that is submitted, the bidder can download the report as a file for record-keeping purposes.

From Heterogeneous Data to Comparable Assessments

As an ongoing research project, SusInfra is already demonstrating how heterogeneous sustainability data can be transformed into a comparable, actionable assessment.

Further Development Focuses on Two Areas: AI Capabilities and Assessment Logic

Currently, AI functions are being developed to expand “if-then” scenarios with additional specific recommendations for action, as well as an AI-supported initial review of submitted documents that converts PDF files into structured form data.

For the rating logic, the plan is to include recycling in the sustainability calculation. In addition, the EPD Matcher will feature a version-controlled history, and the tool will include the parameterized creation of BIM models.