Automated Sustainable Low-Carbon Design of Offshore Platform for Product Life Cycle

Abstract

Faced with the severe situation of carbon emissions, low carbon has become a new trend of social and economic sustainable development. Product low-carbon design originates from green design, which can reduce the carbon footprint of products from the source and achieve sustainable development. This paper is devoted to optimizing the product low-carbon design method based on graph theory. Alternative solutions for the five life cycle stages of the product constitute a design space. Graph theory is applied to the product low-carbon design to effectively find the optimal decision-making scheme with minimum carbon footprint in the entire design space. However, this method is only applicable to the case where the carbon footprint of solutions at each life cycle stage is static. In the face of a dynamically changing carbon footprint, the design result of this method may be erroneous. In this paper, the idea of “break up the whole into parts” could be used to search for the best design scheme of minimizing carbon footprint respectively from each raw material solution as the starting point. The carbon footprint of solutions at several life stages is constrained to the product raw materials and it results in an inaccurate calculation of carbon footprint. This problem in the original method is solved. The product low-carbon design software and the case of low-carbon design of offshore platform leg are the applications of this method.