EricCRX/A1A5_Embodied_Carbon_Calculator

🏗️ A1–A5 Upfront Embodied Carbon Calculator (Local LLM)

Overview

This repository contains a lightweight, deterministic calculator for estimating A1–A5 upfront embodied carbon in building materials and construction processes.
It was designed as part of a sustainability engineering project to make carbon assessments more transparent, modular, and interactive.

The tool includes:

• Rule-based carbon computation following EN15978 and RICS conventions.
• Local LLM integration (google/flan-t5-base) for generating carbon-reduction suggestions.
• A Gradio GUI interface that allows users to input materials, quantities, and emission factors, and instantly view results and insights.

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⚙️ Features

• Input: A1–A5 modules, materials, quantities, units, emission factors, notes.
• Output: Per-row and per-module emissions (kgCO₂e, tCO₂e) + total embodied carbon.
• Integrated suggestion engine:
  • Rule-based heuristics for reduction strategies.
  • LLM-generated design insights using a small local model (no external API).
• Built with strict unit validation to prevent inconsistent calculations.

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🧠 Technical Notes

This calculator runs entirely offline using Hugging Face’s google/flan-t5-base model for text generation.
It does not require API keys and can run on CPU (no GPU necessary).

💡 The local LLM is not used to compute carbon, only to suggest design improvements.

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🧩 How to Run

pip install -r requirements.txt
python app.py