Collaborative System for HK-BEAM Green Building Certification

The built environment is moving towards sustainable development. The number of green buildings increases worldwide in recent years. Green buildings are environmentally, socially and economically desirable. However, the certification of green buildings is often expensive and labor-intensive. The document preparation and review process for green building certification is iterative in nature and requires collaboration of many project participants, certification organizations, and third party engineering consultants. In this paper, we focus on the green building certification in Hong Kong. The BEAM standard, established in 1996, is used for assessing and labeling green buildings in Hong Kong and cities in mainland China. Based on the BEAM standard, we have developed a web-based collaborative system that aims to facilitate the document management and certification planning for BEAM. The role-based access control of the system ensures the right information is available to the right people. This paper presents the features and the underlying logic of the system.