Towards BIM and the EU Level(s) Integration: A Systematic Review and Taxonomy of Digitalisation Approaches for Sustainability Assessment

Despite the construction sector’s major environmental footprint and the complementary roles of the EU Level(s) framework and BIM in lifecycle-based sustainability assessment, systemic understanding of how the two are integrated remains limited. This study conducts a systematic literature review, following PRISMA 2020 guidelines, based on a search of Scopus, WoS Core Collection and ScienceDirect, resulting in 18 included studies after a full-text screening process. Data are examined through bibliometric, descriptive and cross-dimensional analysis, with the studies further classified along three axes, namely contribution type and application context, depth of EU Level(s) application, and level of digitalisation and interoperability. The results show a still-emerging research field, with a marked increase in publication output from 2025 onwards, concentrated on greenhouse gas emissions, the design stage and semi-automatic interoperability, with no study achieving fully automatic BIM–Level(s) data exchange. These three axes are then read jointly to derive a data-driven taxonomy comprising four typological groups, namely conceptual– exploratory, plugin-based applied, scripting/pipeline-based and cross-domain integration studies, revealing a close alignment between contribution type, depth of Level(s) application and digitalisation level. This taxonomy constitutes this review’s novelty, providing a structured basis for future research and practical implementation of digitally enabled sustainability assessment in the AEC sector.