Carbon Emissions of Assembly Buildings Constrained by Flexible Resource: A Study on Cost Optimization

Abstract

The construction industry is a high-energy-consumption industry. Nearly 40% of global carbon emissions derive from the construction industry. Prefabricated assembly technology is an effective means of carbon emission reduction, but the incremental cost of prefabricated components is much more expensive than that of cast-in-place components. It is not conducive for enterprises to choose prefabricated assembly technology to decrease emissions. Most of the current studies focus on the carbon-reduction effect of prefabricated assembled buildings, and there are fewer studies related to the impact of cost factors on enterprises’ participation in building carbon reduction. The cost factor will affect the choice of prefabricated assembly technology to reduce carbon emissions. Therefore, it is necessary to analyze the relationship between carbon emissions and costs in prefabricated buildings. Aiming at this problem, this paper proposes a dual-objective method to optimize cost and carbon emissions by using the improved optimization algorithm to solve the problem. Through the analysis of actual cases, the results show that when the prefabrication rate is 35–40%, enterprises can obtain a better carbon-emission-reduction effect by appropriately increasing the cost. When the prefabrication rate is higher than 40%, the carbon-reduction effect that can be obtained by greatly increasing the cost is limited. Therefore, when enterprises decide a prefabrication range of 35–40%, they are able to obtain the maximum carbon-reduction effect with the minimum cost. This study can provide a reference for the government to formulate relevant policies with energy conservation and emission reductions in prefabricated buildings and also can provide a reference for enterprises to make decisions between carbon emission reduction and cost.