Carbon emissions optimisation in prefabrication construction: A review of current design integrated approaches

The construction industry is the overarching energy consumer and contributes to significant carbon emissions globally. Prefabricated construction has been adopted to alleviate the industry’s pressure on the environment. Thus, the number of scientific publications about the realisation of a sustainable built environment through prefabricated design has followed an exponential trend since 2015. However, it is still not a common practice to implement sustainability during the design stage. Therefore, this study critically reviewed relevant literature on current design tools to evaluate the remaining challenges. The general area of investigation in this research was embodied carbon emissions optimisation in the design phase. Its findings showed that, although assessing sustainability in the design stage had become a hotpot recently, current design assistant tools were ineffective for the designers to generate a sustainable design. Their limited reliability, creativity, and user-unfriendly process were claimed as barriers. In the end, this study proposed a framework for implementing carbon emissions' optimisation in the design phase and concludes by setting out the direction for further work in this area.