## 1 Introduction  
The sustainability of infrastructure and buildings has become one of the focal points of concern in today's society. Sustainability is defined as ensuring development without undermining the ability of future generations to meet their needs [1]. To reach that objective of sustainability, construction designs must be changed to reduce their impact. The impact of one construction should not only be defined by the amount of materials needed to realize the final process, service, or activity, but also the energy consumption necessary to carry out the manufacture of the products or the use of their processes. Some studies estimate that industry's energy consumption accounted for 29% of the total global energy consumption in 2017 [2]. One method used to measure the amount of energy spent in the manufacture of materials or construction processes is to estimate embodied energy (EE). There are different methods for obtaining EE. There is still no clear consensus in the scientific community about which is the best estimation method. Discussion about the methodologies used to assess EE has been carried out mostly in the building construction field [3; 4; 5; 6; 7; 8; 9; 10]. [PERSON] et al. [11] state that EE is the energy associated with each material that makes up an object. Thus, EE is determined as the amount of the energy used over the lifecycle of a service or product. Furthermore, for the total EE calculation, [PERSON] et al. [12] consider the energy needed to support the process under study plus the indirect EE involved in that process. ISO 14040:2006 [13] defines the phases of the lifecycle assessment and proposes another definition for EE. That definition is complicated to use because of omissions and errors contained in that definition. The existence of different methods for defining EE stems from a difference between results obtained for the same evaluation of a service, object, or process. This divergence depends on the definition that the researcher uses for EE [3; 4; 5; 6; 7; 11]. The greatest efforts to decrease energy consumption have been made in the area of building construction. Studies have largely focused on the use and maintenance phase of buildings, and their outcomes have been widely accepted by technicians in this field [14]. However, many authors state that in the construction sector, the highest energy consumption is produced at the manufacturing stage [11]. The energy consumption at this stage is produced by the raw material extraction for the processing and the transport of those materials to the workplace. The impact of the materials needed to carry out one construction can be managed using the Lifecycle Assessment (LCA) methodology defined by ISO 14040 [13] as in the study of [PERSON] et al. [15]. Other authors have focused their research on the study of energy consumption: for example, considering the potential of design codes for lifecycle energy optimization [16] or evaluating the effects of embodied energy reduction measures [17]. These studies have caused researchers to look for automated procedures [18] that allow the attainment of good sustainable solutions, taking advantage of advanced computer tools [19; 20; 21]. For this purpose, researchers have used algorithms to look for economic or sustainable solutions. These algorithms could be heuristic or metaheuristic given the complexity of the structural problems that have been raised. These optimization procedures have been applied to structures like concrete frames and buildings with seismic performance [22; 23], composite pedestrian bridges [24], or reinforced concrete columns [25], among others. According to the optimization criteria, the studies have focused on optimization of different objectives such as cost [26; 27; 28], CO\({}_{2}\) emissions [22; 24], or embodied energy [29].