Enhancing CarboniCa with AI learning

Enhancing CarboniCa with AI learning

The progress on our R&D partnership with Nottingham Trent University and ConstructSys.

Businesses working as part of the UK construction industry, combined with government and customer stakeholders are continuing to drive towards a net zero future.

One of the challenges to achieving this has been the collection and review of meaningful data to challenge traditional decision making and processes when it comes to sustainable construction. Inputting such data and producing high quality assessments to achieve this is also a time intensive activity.

In May 2024, the AIACACI project (AI Accelerated Carbon Assessments for the Construction Industry) a partnership between Morgan Sindall, Nottingham Trent University and software company ConstructSys was awarded a grant of almost £1m by InnovateUK to harness the power of artificial intelligence to enhance CarboniCa, Morgan Sindall’s whole life carbon assessment tool. To date CarboniCa has already been used successfully on 70% of Morgan Sindall Construction’s projects since its launch in 2021. It has supported project teams, consultants and customers to remove 44,367 tonnes of carbon (December 2024) from the communities in which construction projects are being delivered.

The AI enhancements being researched and developed into CarboniCa will accelerate this process, which in turn will pave the way for higher levels of whole life carbon assessment adoption into the sector to achieve carbon reductions.

In this blog we spoke to Amin about the AIACACI project, the progress made and the exciting things to come as the project completes in Spring 2025.

Amin Al-Habaibeh, Professor of Intelligent Engineering Systems and Director of The Product Innovation Centre at Nottingham Trent University, which conducts internationally-leading research and offers sustainable solutions for providing sustainable products and services in a circular economy.

As a partnership, the University and Morgan Sindall Construction have been working together since 2018 to develop the future of the construction workforce.

“NTU students have benefited from the support of Morgan Sindall through placement, graduate opportunities, and career mentoring programmes. In 2023 the relationship developed further with a R&D project in collaboration with my colleagues at School of Architecture, Design the Built Environment. It involved using CarboniCa as a training and educational tool for students to enhance their understanding of decarbonisation practices in the construction industry and build the much-needed skills the industry will require in the future. The output of this was CarboniCa Education, a dedicated version of the product to support academic learning.

“The AIACACI grant is building on this long-term collaboration. The integration of the AI technology to Carbonica will provide data automation and analysis processes that will enhance the business efficiency, allow cost savings, and improve flexibility in the decision-making process.”

NTU is the academic partner on this project to support, integrating our academic knowledge of AI algorithms.

“We are using research and development gained in other fields and applying these to CarboniCa. This integration of artificial intelligence into the software will enable an automated, rapid response to customers’ whole life carbon assessments, utilising more of the products’ existing data and learning.

Working in collaboration with industry allows me and my colleagues to apply our research and innovation into real-world applications.

It gives us a greater sense of accomplishment, knowing that we can support research advancement that will be useful to creating better economic and environmental impact, supporting UK industry to become more competitive in a local, national, or global market. Our project will have a big impact, as the software enhancement will make complex data even more accessible to support those in the construction industry to reduce carbon emissions and address the challenges they face surrounding climate change.”

It’s fantastic to share our project milestones as a team!

“We are happy to say that using insights from previous construction projects, we have managed to train the AI algorithms to allow the estimation of the quantities of materials needed to construct a building, these are all done within suitable and measurable error margins within defined buildings characteristics. This will then provide a rapid calculation of cost and carbon emission based on the desired material for the project – providing efficiencies for the businesses using the tool. Whilst also allowing customers flexibility in the decision making, when it comes to carbon outputs and the impact of their material decisions.

“It was not only fantastic to share these exciting project milestones as a team, but also to share the findings with a much wider audience. Earlier in 2024, the findings were presented in a keynote speech at The International Conference on Sustainable Energy Technologies SET2024 in Shanghai and the Engineering Design show in the UK.”

What’s next?

“Now that we’ve completed some of the first phases of the algorithm training, the next phase will be to automate some of these findings so they’re ready instantly to users to enhance decision making. Automation will also extend to data entry, so by including general characteristics of similar projects, a lot of data entry can be pre-populated at a click of a button rather than repeatedly and manually input.

Our project will complete in Spring 2025, and we’re looking forward to sharing the exciting developments that can be implemented into the construction industry.”