Carbon Footprint Calculator for Malaysian Construction Industry with Case-Based Reasoning

Malaysia's carbon emission level has reached an alarming point. Cnrrently, the country is ranked 30th for the highest amount of carbon emitted by a country. Construction industry alone contributes 24% of the nation's carbon emission. There are various ways of reducing the amount of C02 in the said industry. One of which is through usage of low impact materials in buildings. However, cnrrently there is no existing system such as Carbon Footprint Calculator for the Construction Industry tailoring towards the local needs. This project creates a calculator that can determine the carbon footprint of materials in construction projects embedded with a CaseBased Reasoning (CBR) functionality. The project aims to reduce carbon emission levels for construction activity through better selection and combination of material resulting in lower carbon emission per square feet of a building. Construction firms can ouly make informed and better decision with substantial amount of information such as the total amount of carbon emission per square feet which the system calculates. Furthermore, users of the calculator also have the option to use similar past cases (projects)' s material selection as a solution to a new project to be implemented. Following the prototyping system development life cycle methodology, the software is further refined and tested until the prototype software is fully stable and functioning. The calculator's accuracy is unquestionable and very much reliable through the various test cases conducted on it