A Computational Framework for Estimating the Carbon Footprint of Construction

摘要

Estimation of the carbon emissions in the construction phase of the building life cycle requires acquiring and analysing a great deal of project specific data including the amount of the works performed by different equipment and the unit emissions of various machinery at different work conditions. Such information are very project specific and vary from one stage of the construction phase to another. Building Information Models (BIM) have been proposed as efficient sources of information which can be utilized to computerize the construction carbon estimation. However, an easy-to-use methodology and framework to perform such analysis is still lacking. In this paper, a BIM-based framework is proposed to estimate the construction carbon emissions using the quantity take-offs from BIM and the information obtained from WBS and carbon inventories. The proposed method also includes a predefined simulated construction process for various types of buildings which can be used to estimate the carbon emissions when construction plans are not available. Therefore, the method proposed in this paper can be used to compare carbon emissions of the various potential designs at early stages of the building design. A case study is presented to illustrate the advantages of the proposed framework.