The high consumption of resources in the building industry requires a significant reduction of material in buildings and consequently a reduction of emissions over all phases of the life cycle. This is the aim of the Collaborative Research Centre 1244 Adaptive Skins and Structures for the Built Environment of Tomorrow, funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG), which addresses research on the development and integration of adaptive systems in building structures and skins. New approaches in building planning are required for the implementation of adaptive buildings. Therefore, a multidisciplinary team from various fields such as architecture, civil and mechanical engineering, and system dynamics is necessary. The environmental impacts of the whole life cycle have to be considered for an integral planning process for adaptive buildings right from the beginning. For the integration of the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), four temporal and content-related interfaces were identified in the planning process. Inputs and outputs of the LCA were defined for the relevant planning stages in order to enable the greatest possible benefit for the planners and to minimize the environmental impacts as far as possible. The result of the research work is a methodology that can be used in the future to reduce life cycle-related environmental impacts in the planning process of adaptive buildings (ReAdapt).

Accepting the ecological necessity of a drastic reduction of resource consumption and greenhouse gas emissions in the building industry, the Institute for Lightweight Structures and Conceptual Design (ILEK) at the University of Stuttgart is developing graded concrete components with integrated concrete hollow spheres. These components weigh a fraction of usual conventional components while exhibiting the same performance. Throughout the production process of a component, the positions of the hollow spheres and the level of the fresh concrete have to be monitored with high accuracy and in close to real-time, so that the quality and structural performance of the component can be guaranteed. In this contribution, effective solutions of multiple sphere detection and concrete surface modeling based on the technology of terrestrial laser scanning (TLS) during the casting process are proposed and realized by the Institute of Engineering Geodesy (IIGS). A complete monitoring concept is presented to acquire the point cloud data fast and with high-quality. The data processing method for multiple sphere segmentation based on the efficient combination of region growing and random sample consensus (RANSAC) exhibits great performance on computational efficiency and robustness. The feasibility and reliability of the proposed methods are verified and evaluated by an experiment monitoring the production of an exemplary graded concrete component. Some suggestions to improve the monitoring performance and relevant future work are given as well.