Leveraging Artificial Intelligence for Creating Material Passports from Building Stock Documents: A Workflow for Promoting Circularity in the Built Environment

To advance the concept of a circular built environment, it is essential to collate and examine material data from existing structures. Material passports—digital documents detailing materials, components, and their properties—are vital in this process. However, generating material passports from building stock documents remains underexplored, presenting challenges such as inefficient information exchange and the labour-intensive digitizing of building stock documents. This paper introduces a novel AI-enabled workflow to address these challenges by automating the extraction, organization, and enhancement of product and material information from building stock documents. Unlike traditional manual methods, the workflow leverages artificial intelligence to improve data extraction, streamline standardization, and integrate publicly available datasets into a centralized digital database. The processed data can be retrieved via the database in standardized data formats (e.g. Excel, CSV, building models) or via an API to facilitate digital data exchange and enable an assessment of the circular economy. The workflow’s practical application is demonstrated in a German building case study, highlighting challenges in data quality and standardization during implementation. ... mehrBy automating and enhancing data handling, the workflow reduces manual effort, increases efficiency, and ensures higher data reliability. This approach enables the streamlined creation of material passports, empowering property managers with actionable insights for renovation and maintenance decisions while contributing to the circularity goals of the built environment.