Expanding Underground.

Knowledge and Passion to Make a Positive Impact

on the World – Anagnostou, Benardos & Marinos (Eds)
© 2023 The Author(s), ISBN 978-1-003-34803-0
Open Access: www.taylorfrancis.com, CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license

BIM-enabled carbon accounting and integrated design of

underground infrastructures

X.L. Chen, M.Q. Huang & Q.B. Zhang

Monash University, Australia

R. Wang
Arup, Australia

ABSTRACT: The underground infrastructure construction has lacked progress towards

decarbonization and sustainability due to inconsistency of practice, uniqueness of ground con­
ditions, and independency of disciplines, urging to transition the way we design, construct,
and operate tunnels. This paper reviews current internationally accepted guidelines of carbon
accounting methodologies, namely the module-based method from EN 15978 and the scoped-
based method from Greenhouse Gas Protocol, then seeks to digitally implement these
methods to account emissions sources in tunnelling, enabled by parametric modelling in
Building Information Modelling (BIM) with a case study of prefabricated station. Further­
more, to fundamentally integrate carbon assessments with geotechnical design, a multi-
objective optimization algorithm is implemented to generate the optimal solutions resolving the
conflicted goals of stability and carbon reductions for TBM tunnel support design. This paper
proposes a BIM-enabled carbon-integrated design workflow for underground infrastructures.

1 INTRODUCTION

Since the global infrastructure booms in past decades due to exponential population grow and
urbanization, subsurface developments have become one of the most effective solutions to
resolve issues of space shortage and congestion in the transport sector. The urban develop­
ments have also imposed inevitable impacts on local and global environments causing climate
change. With the release of the IPCC Assessment Report, it has pointed out that the largest
contribution to climate change and other sequential damage on ecosystems is Greenhouse Gas
(GHG) emissions from human activities, leading to the realization of the international goal of
Net Zero of 2050 for wellbeing of future generations (Rama et al., 2022). Therefore, sustain­
ability, often interpreted as three intersecting circles of social, economic, and environmental
impacts, is shifted to be of equal importance to safety in the Architect, Engineering, Construc­
tion (AEC) industry (Ortiz et al., 2009). While sustainable developments have been well prac­
ticed in building industry in the past decade, the underground infrastructures have lacked
progress towards decarbonization and faced difficulty from lack of initiatives, guidance,
standards, and references due to its nature of large-scale, independency, and uncertainty.
Looking at the progress towards sustainable construction, publications of national study
investigating one country’s carbon emissions composition can help understand the carbon
hotspot in national scale, providing guidance for decision makers. For example, UK’s Infra­
structure Carbon Review 2020 Data Update following its preliminary studies of “Low Carbon
Construction” and “Infrastructure Carbon Review” has revealed that up to 59% of the
national total carbon footprint comes from 5 major infrastructure sectors (Giesekam, 2020).

DOI: 10.1201/9781003348030-4

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While the infrastructure sector water, energy, communication, and waste have achieved signifi­
cant reductions of up to 40% of their own sector footprint since 2010, the transport is the only
sector with increasing emissions of up to 30%. To establish accounting of carbon footprints
from built environments, several institutions and organizations have published their standards
and guidelines to calculate carbon emissions with different methodology and various system
boundary classification (EN15978, 2011, ghgprotocol, 2004). While different regions have their
own preferences of accounting methods, all presented methods have put their focus on buildings
and on-surface infrastructures (e.g., roads, bridges, rails), lacking specifications and instructions
for underground infrastructures. Considering the potential future developments of tunnels and
metro stations, engineers must urgently come to a common understanding of quantification of
tunnelling emissions so that sustainable decision making can be made during geotechnical and
structural design with sufficient references and benchmarks. Therefore, this paper reviews two
most commonly accepted GHG emissions accounting methodologies, namely the module-based
method from EN 15978 and the scoped-based method from Greenhouse Gas Protocol by inves­
tigating their applicability in tunnel and station projects with case studies.
On the one hand, GHG accounting for underground infrastructure is highly inconsistent and
uncertain as mentioned above. On the other hand, there are gaps between GHG inventory and
actual geotechnical design, where stability analysis and tunnel support design are segregated
from sustainability assessments, even though these two disciplines are highly dependent. For
a fundamentally effective sustainable design approach, analysis from both disciplines mush be
integrated during decision making. Digitalization, as a series of digital tools and information
assets, engaged with advanced technologies and effective systems, could be the key enabler to
fundamentally transition the way we design, construct, and operate sustainable tunnel projects
(IET, 2022). Building Information Modelling (BIM) refers to the process of a digital representa­
tion of the physical asset with its geometrical properties and semantic enrichment (Eastman
et al., 2011), which could serve as an interactive platform to store and manage corresponding
parameters (e.g. GHG inventory, design variables) for integrated engineering analysis, and
finally design optimization for sustainable decision making. In the context of geotechnical
design for tunnels and metro stations, this paper incorporates BIM to streamline and automate
model digitalization, stability analysis, carbon assessments and design optimization.
This paper is organised as follows. Section 2 reviews the current practice of scope-based
method to account carbon emissions of tunnelling projects. Section 3 reviews the module-
based method and seeks to embed this method in BIM to automate carbon accounting for
station projects. Section 4 investigates the integration of carbon assessments and conventional
geotechnical analysis method by applying multi-objective optimization algorithms. Section 5
concludes this paper with discussions.

2 CARBON ACCOUNTING: SCOPE-BASED METHOD

Carbon accounting/assessment/analysis, or formally referred as GHG Inventory Development

is a process of identifying GHG emission sources and quantifying the corresponding emis­
sions. Depending on the definition of system boundary, the commonly accepted accounting
methodologies can be categorised into scope-based method (organisational boundary) and
module-based method (chronological boundary). Regardless of scope-based or module-based
method, carbon assessment is not only accounting CO2 emission, but all gases that impose
greenhouse effects including many others. Factored by their Global Warming Potentials
(GWP) and summed up, all GHG from each emission source is quantified as a single numeric
value with unit of CO2 equivalent (CO2e).
The scope-based method (ghgprotocol, 2004) originates from The Greenhouse Gas Protocol
developed by the World Resources Institute (WRI) and the World Business Council for Sustain­
able Development (WBCSD) for carbon assessments in organisational level. While it is initially
designed for organisations such as private companies and corporates, its fundamentals are inter­
nationally endorsed and recognised by parties from other sectors, such as the United States
Environmental Protection Agency (USEPA) and the Transport Authorities Greenhouse Group

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(TAGG) in Australia Therefore, its application has extended to project level accounting with
sector-specific adaptations. For example, the TAGG published the GHG Assessment Work­
book for Road Projects in 2013, applying the scope-based classification to standardise
accounted emission items in road projects. In Victoria, Australia, there are two major under­
ground infrastructure projects that have used the scope-based method to officially account for
their GHG emissions, namely Melbourne Metro Tunnel and West Gate Tunnel. By investigat­
ing their official Environmental Effect Statements (EES) (bigbuild, 2022), the scope-based
system boundary for tunnel projects is introduced in section 2.1.

2.1 System boundary: Scopes

In scope-based method, GHG emissions are categorised into three scopes, namely Scope 1:
Direct GHG emissions, Scope 2: Electricity indirect GHG emissions, and Scope 3: Other indir­
ect GHG emissions (Figure 1. Left). As a case study, using the Greenhouse Gas protocol as
guidance, Metro Tunnel has a 9-km twin tunnel with 5 metro stations located in Melbourne
CBD. In Figure 1. Right, the scope-based method accounting results show that the majority of
GHG arises from the embodied carbon of materials in scope 3 considering the massive amount
of concrete used as linings. On the other hand, sources in scope 1 and 2 mainly from construc­
tion plant/equipment have relatively small emissions accounting only 30% of total footprints.
West Gate Tunnel has also demonstrated a similar composition where scope 3 is the largest con­
tribution of up to 80% of total emissions. It is worth noting that it has not accounted the sta­
tions explicitly like Metro Tunnel. By summarising their common accounted items, the detailed
emission sources in scope-based system boundary is described in following sections.

Figure 1. (Left) the definitions of scopes in scope-based method. (Right) account results of Metro
Tunnel and West Gate Tunnel.

2.1.1 Scope 1: Direct GHG emissions

Scope 1 emissions are GHGs directly generated from activities owned/controlled by the pro­
ject. These activities refer to processes in any equipment, plants, and vehicles that are used to
conduct works in the construction site. Tunnel projects could include the following activities:
• Diesel combustion of any equipment and plants used by personnel to conduct construction,
excavation, installation, removal, and any other activities necessary to finish the planned
works, including combustion in electricity generator on site.
• Diesel/petrol combustions in all site vehicles for transportation of personnel, materials,
waste, equipment/plant within the construction site.
• Removals and disturbance of vegetations that serves as carbon sinks (absorb carbon diox­
ide more than it can release).
• Any other physical/chemical processes that directly produce and emit carbon dioxides.

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2.1.2 Scope 2: Electricity indirect GHG emissions
Scope 2 emissions are GHGs that are indirectly emitted offsite from generation of electricity,
heating/cooling to perform activities associated with the tunnel project. These include:
• Electricity powered equipment/plant to conduct construction and excavation works on site
(e.g. TBMs, Roadheaders, pumps).
• Heating, ventilation, air conditioning (HVAC), lighting, and any other utility powered by
electricity in the construction site, including power consumption by site offices.

2.1.3 Scope 3: Other indirect GHG emissions

Scope 3 emissions are indirect GHGs that originated from sources not owned or controlled by
the project/company, but serve as consequences and/or contributions to activities of the
accounted project/company. Typical scope 3 emissions:
• Extraction and production of purchased materials and fuels.
• Transportation of purchased materials and fuels.
• Disposal and transportation of waste.

2.2 Limitations
Even though the scope-based method is globally accepted in many disciplines, the standard­
ised adaptations in tunnelling is still lacking, leading to inconsistency of account items
between applications in different projects. As scopes are classified based on project/organisa­
tion boundary, in actual practice some jointed activities may have difficulty in distinguishing
between scope 1 and 3, leading to potential overestimation from repeated accounting. Fur­
thermore, unlike any other on-surface construction, great uncertainty has occurred in scope 2
due to inconsistent calculating method of the electricity indirect emissions from TBM tunnel­
ling. The Metro Tunnel has used the TBM power rating to estimate its electricity consump­
tion, while the North East Link directly uses TBM consumption data from West Gate Tunnel
to convert based on tunnel lengths, despite that they have different TBMs in different geo­
logical conditions. Therefore, it has been pointed out that the tunnel construction and oper­
ations have lacked a standardised scope-based approach to account for their GHG emissions,
thus imposing difficulty in providing meaningful advice for sustainable decision making.

3 CARBON ACCOUNTING: MODULE-BASED METHOD

CEN/TC 350 The Technical Committee for Sustainability of Construction Works published
their comprehensive framework for assessing the sustainability performance of construction
activities. These standards include the calculation method defined in EN15978, and the Environ­
mental Product Declarations (EPD) standardised in EN15804. The module-based method refers
to the modularity principle defined in EN15978 for environmental impact assessments of con­
struction works. Popularly accepted by industries, major databases, and integrated in many Life
Cycle Assessment (LCA) tools, EN15978 assigns all activities to chronologically categorised
modules for whole life cycle of construction assets grouped under four life cycle stages: Product
(A1-A3), Construction (A4-A5), Use (B1-B5), End of Life (C1-C4), Beyond life cycle (D).

3.1 System boundary: Modules

The system boundary of carbon accounting with module-based method for tunnel-specific
projects has not been defined yet. Even though the module-based method and scope-based
method have fundamentally different system boundary definition, they still have to account
for the same emission items. Therefore, the account items in scope-based method identified in
Section 2.1 will be utilised to fit in the EN15978 modules (Table 1).

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Table 1. Common construction activities as account items in scope-based and module-based methods.
Emission source Activities Scope Module

Transport fuel Spoil removal 13 A4

Materials delivery 3 A4
Site vehicles 13 A5
Stationary fuel Construction plant/equipment (including demolition/ 13 A5
earthworks)
Purchased electricity Construction plant/equipment (TBM included) 2 A5
Site offices 23 A5
Embodied carbon in Stations 3 A1-A3
materials Tunnels/portals 3 A1-A3
Rolling stock 3 A1-A3
Other Excavation of vegetation 1 A5
Treatment of WASS 3 A5

3.2 BIM for carbon accounting

As aforementioned, BIM is a digital advancement that has great potential for underground
infrastructures by streamlining workflows (Huang et al., 2021). A core technology to BIM is
automatic geometric manipulation and information enrichment through parametric model­
ling. One of the most significant features of parametric modelling is variable parameters as
they directly dictate the usage of models. Given appropriate definitions of those parameters,
they provide enough degrees of freedom to allow effective changes while remain convenient to
implement. Therefore, multiple level of details (LoD) representations of BIM models for three
representative underground infrastructures have been proposed, in accordance to (DAUB,
2019) for tunnel structure, and (Huang et al., 2022) for mined excavation, as shown in
Figure 2. Correspondingly, the appropriate parameters are defined to satisfy the intended use
case of model at a distinct LoD.

Figure 2. Multi-LoD model for support/structure of a typical TBM tunnel, mined station and prefabri­
cated station.

BIM aids in lifecycle-based environmental sustainability analysis (Wong and Zhou, 2015).
Parameterisation and automation capabilities are key strengths. After understanding the emis­
sion source of underground construction and their accounting methods, the corresponding
data and design parameters (e.g. carbon factors, transport mode, construction equipment/
plant) can be collected into a BIM model enriching its semantic contents with respects to the
environmental attributes and values. Along with calculation methods and associated formu­
las, automatic carbon accounting and reporting can be enabled.

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 Using the protype of a prefabricated station (Yang and Lin, 2021), a parametric analysis of
CO2 calculation is conducted leveraging the module-based approach as defined in Table 1. By pre­
defining the system boundary and life cycles in the BIM platform, the imported parameters are
linked to the corresponding formulas, so that assessment results can be instantly generated from
parameter value inputs with automatic inferences. By generating a few design alternatives with
different design parameters (e.g., more height, double columns, double slabs), the corresponding
carbon assessment can be performed. Starting from retrieving and assigning parameters and cor­
responding values to the model components, and engages an automatic parameter/value assigning
algorithm. Then, the function of creating parameters that numerically relate to other parameters
is achieved by using formulae. In this way, the GHG emission can be generated according to the
volumes of the components, as shown in Figure 3. This can help the decision makers to identify
the impact and sensitivity of key design variables and make changes accordingly.

Figure 3. Total embodied carbon and proportionate contributions by components of four alternatives.

4 INTEGRATED DESIGN WITH STABILITY

After the carbon assessment results can be calculated using the methods introduced previ­
ously, the actual geotechnical analysis for support design is still not taking these carbon emis­
sions into consideration. To fundamentally change the geotechnical design with the goal of
carbon reduction, the carbon assessments must be seamlessly integrated into conventional
geotechnical analysis. However, these two disciplines have conflicting objectives, where
a more sustainable design would have compromised geotechnical stability. For example, redu­
cing the thickness and strength of linings decreases the carbon footprint of tunnelling, but also
compromises the tunnel stability, which is not acceptable. The ultimate challenge is how to
determine the “best” trade-off between different stability and sustainability. Therefore, this
paper proposes to utilise the multi-objective optimization algorithms.
Multi-objective optimisation is a topic concerned with multi-criteria decision making, where
two or more objectives are conflicting with each other and one solution satisfying all goals is
not possible (Chang, 2015). The main goal of multi-objective optimisation is to calculate the
Pareto front, which is a set of optimal solutions that give the best trade-off among all objectives.
In this state, no objectives can be improved without degrading any other objectives, so that the
decision maker can select from these optimal solutions. As one of the most popular multi-
objective optimization algorithms, the elitist genetic algorithm, a variant of the famous Non-
dominated Sorting Genetic Algorithm II (NSGA-II) will be used in this paper (Deb, 2001).

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 To streamline the design process and automate carbon analysis with integrated geotechnical
analysis, a Graphical User Interface (GUI) is developed for user inputs and design outputs
(Figure 4). Starting from the left panel named Digitalisation, basic geometrical and geological
information of the tunnel are input here to define the tunnel dimensions, insitu stress, and
selection of constitutive models. The middle panel named Stability, allows the user to select
the tunnel lining material and other parameters. The Convergence-Confinement Method
(CCM) will be used as the stability analysis method (Panet and Sulem, 2022), while the carbon
assessment will use module-based method from EN15978 considering the product stage emis­
sion of reinforced concrete lining in the right panel.
Finally, by selecting the optimization objectives and design variables, the optimization can
begin processing. For a typical TBM tunnel with fixed alignments, the design variables chosen
here are lining thickness, lining strength, installation distance from tunnel face, and TBM con­
finement pressure ratio. The problem will be optimised to minimise carbon emissions, minim­
ise tunnel convergence, and optimise Factor of Safety (FoS) from CCM. The final design
output will be demonstrated in the bottom right corner once the calculation is complete.

Figure 4. The GUI of the interactive platform for carbon-integrated geotechnical analysis and design.

Figure 5. (Left) The 3D pareto front with objectives of carbon emissions, tunnel convergence, and FoS.
(Right) The 2D pareto front with objectives of carbon emissions and FoS.

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 As there are three objectives selected, the design output will be a 3D surface (Figure 5.
Left). Theoretically, the interpolated surface from Pareto front should lies below all the black
points (randomly generated design outputs), indicating the generated optimal solutions have
lower carbon emissions than the overall design space. Looking at the plane of Carbon and
Convergence, no relationship can be identified as all optimal points are spread over the plane.
This can be explained as the embodied carbon is solely controlled by the concrete strength
and thickness, while the tunnel convergence depends on the support installation time. These
are all independent design variables dictating unrelated objectives. Looking at the other plane
of Carbon and FoS, a proportional relationship can be observed. The stronger the support,
the higher the carbon emissions surely. However, for the same FoS on any vertical axis, there
still appears to be a wide range of optimal solutions that is hard to locate. This is because the
third objective of tunnel convergence has biased the Pareto optimal due to its low dependency
with the other two objectives. This can be solved by removing the objective of minimising
tunnel convergence and the problem is optimised again. The bi-objective optimization result
has shown a clear pareto front line lying under the randomly generated design space
(Figure 5. Right). This means that for any requirement of FoS, the optimised solution has
successfully obtained the minimised carbon objective by delaying support installation time,
thus reducing the support stress. This optimiser can serve as a power tool for decision makers
to understand the trade-off between different self-defined objectives, thus selecting the best
solution that suits one’s needs.

5 CONCLUSION

In the context of Net Zero by 2050, to promote sustainable construction in underground

infrastructure, this paper reviews the most recognised carbon assessments methodologies
and their system boundary definition. By investigating their current practice in tunnel
projects, it is realised that there are great uncertainty and variability in scope-based
method, potentially due to ambiguous definition of Scope 1 and 3 and lack of under­
standing of TBM tunnelling consumptions. After the module-based method is reviewed
and implemented in the summarised tunnel carbon inventory, module-based method is
incorporated in BIM to allow automatic assessment and identification of carbon hotspot for
several design alternatives of a prefabricated metro station. Finally, to fundamentally inte­
grate geotechnical analysis and carbon reduction, a GUI is developed allowing design auto­
mation and multi-objective optimization with streamlined workflow of user inputs and
design outputs. This paper hopes to serve as basis of carbon accounting, automatic assess­
ment in BIM, and sustainable design optimization of underground construction.

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