Documentation

Raw Dataset on embodied carbon:

We are using the Embodied Carbon Benchmark Study by Carbon Leadership Forum (LCA for Low Carbon Study, Part One, 2017) that includes data on Research Database Building Characteristics and LCA Parameters. The LCA data includes stage A and B for most datapoints. Detailed documentation on the study can be found here: https://carbonleadershipforum.org/embodied-carbon-benchmark-study-1/

The limitations we faced were the lack of material type and quantities, mentioned as "Of note, while the primary structural material type was collected in the confidential database, this information is not included in the research database."

Therefore, we studied the basic principles that helped us assign structural category against each data point. We identified four main types of structural types:

  1. Wood
  2. Wood-Concrete Hybrid (20 % concrete & 80 % wood in material quantities, while 38% concrete & 62% wood in embodied carbon calculation)
  3. Reinforced - Concrete
  4. Steel-concrete (20 % steel & 80 % concrete in material quantities, while 77% steel & 23% concrete in embodied carbon calculation)

The basis of assigning structural types are as follows:

  1. If TCO2 is more than 300 and floor is between 1-6 - it is an RC building, else is Wood
  2. If building is more than 25 floors and more than 1000 TC02 its a steel concrete, otherwise its a concrete building
  3. If TCO2 is more than 250 and floor is between 1-6 - it is an Wood Hybrid
  4. If 400TCO2 is 7-14 floors, then we have RC structure
  5. If more than 25 and below 300 TCO2, its RC

Data distribution:

There are some embedded biases in the dataset. For example there are more samples for medium-size buildings with lower carbon footprint. Therefore the predictions will be better for this scale. However the input data are not very correlated so the models are able to learn and not overfit.


Model A:

Scenario A includes a regression model which predicts the CO2 emissions based on the total area, number of floors, location, construction type and type of building. As we can see on the graphs, the model is able to learn this relationship reaching a mean squared error of 0.016.


Model B:

Scenario B includes a classification model which predicts the class of the construction type of the building based on the target CO2 emissions, the building type, the total area, the number of floors and the location. As we can see on the graphs, the model is able to learn the relationship reaching accuracy of 94%.


Rhino-Plugin - Flask Server:

We have linked a user-friendly Rhino plugin built with WPF in c# to a live flask server that calls a trained ML model to query the user parameters and display the desired information in the backend. Since this tool utilizes a flask server, we can host this on a cloud server to enable the possibility to scale the product. In addition, this tool can run entirely in the background where the user would only need to have a valid Rhino 7 license to empower their design decisions within the context of climate change and LEARN ABOUT CARBON!



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