According to some evaluation studies of the European and Asian construction industry, it is a labour-intensive and low-productivity business. The advancements developed in this industry are not growing too much in the last century. However, on the other end, the manufacturing industry keeps improving and advancing. Its productivity is increasing with a growing rate....[ Read more ]

According to some evaluation studies of the European and Asian construction industry, it is a labour-intensive and low-productivity business. The advancements developed in this industry are not growing too much in the last century. However, on the other end, the manufacturing industry keeps improving and advancing. Its productivity is increasing with a growing rate.

Researchers believe we could dramatically improve the weaknesses of construction business by borrowing the ideas used for advancing the manufacturing industry. Prefabrication, the practice of assembling off-site manufactured concrete forms, is one of the bridges that connect construction business into the highway of improvement.

The main goal of this thesis is to develop methodology to accommodate diversified user requirements of prefab production, to improve the economy of scale through commonality analysis, and to enhance the adaptability of customer requirement. We first define the way to represent prefab designs in a compact way. The formulation of commonality features would be followed, which is based on the representation and mould assembling procedures. An algorithm would be applied for feature selection which maximizes the benefits of commonality. We estimated that the effort needed for mould changeover in our practice is reduced by 1-fourth compared with current practice.