Cradle to Gate Emissions Modeling for Scheduling of Construction Projects

This paper presents an innovative way of integrating scheduling and project controls with the environmental impact of a construction project to track, monitor, and manage environmental emissions at the activity level. As a starting point, scheduling and project controls help monitor the status of a project to provide an assessment of the duration and sequence of activities. Additionally, project schedules can also reflect resource allocation and costs associated with various phases of a construction project. Owners, contractors and construction managers closely monitor tasks or activities on the critical path(s) and/or longest path(s) calculated through network based scheduling techniques. However, existing industry practices do not take into account environmental impact associated with each activity during the life cycle of a project. Although the environmental impact of a project may be tracked in various ways, that tracking is not tied to the project schedule and, as such, generally is not updated when schedules are revised. In this research, a Cradle to Gate approach is used to estimate environmental emissions associated with each activity of a sample project schedule. The research group has also investigated the potential determination of scenarios of lowest environmental emissions, just as project managers currently determine scenarios with lowest cost or time. This methodology can be scaled up for future work to develop a library of unit emissions associated with commonly used construction materials and equipment. This will be helpful for project owners, contractors, and construction managers to monitor, manage, and reduce the carbon footprint associated with various projects.