When the buildings will be manufactured like cars if at all?

Is the way to increase the efficiency of the construction industry to duplicate organizational methodologies and design concepts known from large-scale production - the automotive industry or consumer electronics? The nature of the product and the way the process is organized appear to be a practical obstacle to supporting this claim. In this post, I will focus on the technical side of the issue, leaving the organizational aspect for another post.

Fundamental differences

A car or telephone is a mass, standardized product consisting of many individualized and adapted parts and components. On the other hand, we have a building that is an individual object consisting of standardized materials, parts and components. The difference is fundamental.

The bricks that make up a phone, car or any other mass product are profitable to adapt so that they only consist of this one product. The scale of production will pay off the cost of designing and manufacturing components that fit only one phone. Although here a certain amount of standardization takes place, for example, common floorboards for several models within an automotive concern or a family of processors in computers. However, we are still operating in mass production.

The building blocks are as they are. There are few options for changes and it is the designers who decide each time how to put them together so that they best meet specific expectations or criteria. Expectations are usually defined by the investor or end user. The designer uses the method of successive approximations and details to produce an instruction for assembling individual materials and devices, which is then implemented with a better or worse result at the construction site.

So, as the construction industry, are we able to standardize buildings so that their production could resemble the automated production of cars, from components that fit together perfectly? Is there such a need at all?

One of the goals of implementing BIM in design is to avoid collisions and mismatches on site. It is the equivalent of virtual prototyping. We are able to prepare a digital building model for implementation and be almost sure that the elements will match each other. The technology even automatically monitors assembly progress and model compliance. At least geometric compatibility.

Since we are technically ready to prepare precise construction documentation for the facility and verify the physical compliance of the building with the documentation, why is the situation at construction sites not in the expected dynamic improvement in terms of efficiency? What else has to happen for the efficiency of construction to increase? Can building be like automated car assembly? The secret seems to lie in the building materials, subassemblies, the degree of their aggregation and the means used for assembly. The subject is particularly important in view of the shrinking labor force at construction sites.

Options

In this respect, two ways seem to be visible: assembly of large-size, ready-made elements prepared outside the construction site and attempts to automate processes at the site with the help of various types of robots, better or worse able to imitate the work of a worker and incorporate currently available building materials. While the first case, i.e. the prefabrication of building fragments, is quite well recognized and the degree of automation in the production of prefabricated elements is a limitation of effectiveness, in the second case, ordering robots to imitate human labor seems to be a dead end. Firstly, most of the currently available building materials are adapted to the capabilities of the human body. Brick is what it is because it fits in the palm of your hand. The hollow blocks are larger, but the volume, partially empty, does not increase their weight and man is able to lift them. The plasterboard is 1.2 m wide, because it is easy to grab and stabilize vertically on a frame (also made of small-sized elements). Elements of the formwork systems meet similar criteria. Does it make sense to build robots and have them assemble materials and devices adapted to the dimensions of the human body? After all, the technical capabilities of the robots go far beyond 1.2 m and 30 kg. At this point, the possibility of delivering the element to the place of incorporation becomes a barrier, but this is an organizational problem. Another limitation of the dimensions is the architecture itself and the elimination of all kinds of "alleys" that require cuts and special treatment. Apart from the consumption of time, these elements are the main waste generators which, as an industry, the construction industry generates a lot. However, this is a separate and equally important issue.

Is construction then just about to break out of the horizontal trend of increasing productivity? The prefabrication path outside the construction site is used quite widely in industrial, infrastructure and residential construction (mainly outside Poland). The assembly work automation path seems to be in the R&D phase.

To sum up

What was achievable on the basis of available technologies has already been achieved or is subject to relatively little improvement. Construction is still a cascade process that ends with a unique product. Even prefabricated elements are largely manufactured "made to measure". Like in handicrafts. Will designing a clay pot in 3d significantly change a potter's efficiency? Without the integration and increase in the share of industrial production methods and the standardization of digital information and its flow (this is the topic we want to talk about in DCN), a radical increase in the productivity of the construction industry has little chance. BIM is a fantastic integration tool at all stages. It allows you to prototype and coordinate elements without limiting their complexity. Therefore, with the help of BIM, it is possible to design more aggregated parts of buildings and their implementation in industrial plants, with industrial precision, and to generate all the data needed during the process. This, in turn, will allow for the correct fitting of complex elements on the construction site with a minimum amount of labor. In such a situation, the on-site execution time may be significantly shortened, and aggregated elements may be produced simultaneously outside construction, using industrialized methods. Not to mention being able to coordinate and control the process by having information in the form of data right from the start.

A step towards the further industrialization of construction seems to be the philosophy hidden under the abbreviation DfMA, i.e. Design for Manufacturing and Assembly. It is an approach that postulates the analysis and optimization of the entire production process towards automation of production and acceleration of assembly of standardized building components. This is an extremely interesting trend worth devoting to in one of the following entries.

Production automation is also information flow automation.

Machines expect a project in a certain form. Often, adapting the documentation to the requirements of the machine can take up unnecessary time, which could be saved if we were to navigate a unified conceptual standard. In other words, information also requires prefabrication into repetitive and machine-understandable concepts. Are we, as an industry, ready to limit the dictionary and the form so that the information we produce is prefabricated for purposes?

• production,

• machine processing,

• collecting and interpreting data,

• data-driven decision making?

Such initiatives already exist. More in one of the following entries.