Minimizing Carbon Emission of Prefabricated Reinforced Concrete T-Beams Using BIM and Two-Stage Metaheuristic Searching

As an essential sector of the construction industry, bridge construction produces a large amount of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, greatly intensifying the global greenhouse effect. Prefabricated reinforced concrete (RC) T-beams are a vital type of structural element widely used in bridge construction projects such as river-spanning bridges, high-speed railways, and urban expressways. This study proposes a bridge structural optimization framework using building information modeling (BIM) and two-stage metaheuristic searching (MS) in order to minimize the carbon emission of prefabricated RC T-beams. Under the constraints of corresponding design specifications, the first stage of the proposed MS is utilized to optimize the longitudinal steel section size and area of the T-beam, with carbon emission as the optimization objective. The optimal combination of rebar diameters is then obtained in the second stage of the proposed MS. An illustrative example is also provided to demonstrate the performance of the proposed framework. Moreover, the proposed framework is compared with conventional approaches as well as other metaheuristic algorithms to validate the developed optimization approach.