Real-time carbon assessments and design exploration for early-stage building projects

Fast and accurate carbon-informed decision-making from the earliest stages of design

Climate Change Mitigation Advancing Net Zero

Problem addressed

Reducing the embodied carbon of buildings is critical to meeting Net Zero targets, yet the construction industry struggles to address this challenge early in the design process when we have the greatest influence over a project’s embodied and whole life carbon impact. Most available tools focus on late-stage design and require laborious, manual data input to generate embodied carbon insights, which often also requires a certain level of expertise. This complexity creates a barrier to adopting whole life carbon assessments (WLCAs) across projects. Without accessible, intuitive tools, stakeholders miss opportunities to optimise their designs, leading to potential non-compliance with evolving regulations and unnecessarily higher carbon impacts during construction.

Solution Overview

Preoptima CONCEPT is a web app and API that allows building stakeholders to easily and accurately perform real-time whole-life carbon assessments (WLCAs) and carbon optioneering from the earliest stages of design. Unlike many existing tools, CONCEPT is intuitive for both experts and beginners alike, making WLCAs far more accessible across all levels of project teams.

The platform’s patented AI and generative design algorithms enable fast and accurate design exploration, giving users the ability to create and compare multiple design options with instant feedback on the embodied and whole life carbon impact. CONCEPT’s accuracy in automated material quantity take-offs for building massings allows users to obtain carbon insights early and without laborious manual data input, making it an ideal solution for stakeholders seeking to start projects with a low-carbon baseline.

With CONCEPT, users can model different materials, assemblies, and whole buildings, receiving real-time carbon analysis and identifying carbon hotspots. Users have the flexibility to download OBJ files from popular design tools such as SketchUp, Rhino, or Revit and import them into CONCEPT, allowing for straightforward carbon assessments that fit into existing design workflows.

In addition, CONCEPT’s API offers flexibility by enabling integration into various workflows and software environments, allowing for custom applications as needed.

Looking ahead, CONCEPT will integrate with the Planning Application Carbon Evaluation and Reduction (PACER) platform, creating the first end-to-end solution for whole life carbon compliance across both industry and local authority workflows, ensuring a seamless connection between design and policy.

Company name

Preoptima

UK availability

Yes

Solution launch date

January 2023

Solutions submitted by

Preoptima Ltd

Case study

Preoptima was crucial for Group14 Engineering, a consulting firm, to compare the relative impacts of different structural systems during the design stage of a new higher education facility in the Rocky Mountain Region. A concept-level analysis was run on the project, comparing four different structural systems: concrete, steel, hybrid-timber, and a full timber system. Data and visualisations from Preoptima showed that a 50-70% reduction in embodied carbon could be achieved if the project used either a timber or hybrid-timber structural system instead of concrete or steel. The analysis was completed within a week, and a decision was made to use mass timber for the non-lab portions of the building avoiding 2,221 tCO2e in embodied carbon emissions.

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