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license: mit
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# 🏗️ 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
```bash
pip install -r requirements.txt
python app.py