Industrialization and Decarbonization of the Construction Process

Start Date: January 2023

Duration: 5 Years

Building construction is an important industrial sector, providing employment opportunities, contributing markedly to Canada’s GDP, and addressing the demand for housing and institutional facilities. Yet the construction industry is lagging behind in terms of innovation, employing conventional construction methods associated with high rates of material waste, human error, rework, and occupational health hazards. To address these challenges and move the industry toward offsite construction, the NSERC Industrial Research Chair (IRC) in the Industrialization of Building Construction was established in 2011 as a joint initiative of the University of Alberta, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC), Alberta Innovates, and a consortium of industry partners from across the offsite construction supply chain. The IRC was successful in deploying novel research to facilitate the paradigmatic shift from conventional on-site construction to offsite construction methods. The next chapter will be to bring about a meaningful progression toward true manufacturing in building construction.

The objectives of the proposed research initiative are to characterize the current practice and use lean concepts to improve the productivity of the offsite building construction sector; develop technologies to facilitate mechanization and automation of the offsite building construction sector; develop a framework for data-driven planning and management in construction manufacturing; propose a building information modelling (BIM)-based framework to automate drafting and design for manufacturing, automate the assessment of GHG, and automate the assessment of building system energy demand to support low-energy building technologies; apply artificial intelligence (AI)-based tools to digitalize the manufacturing process; improve occupational safety through ergonomics studies; and develop a framework for onsite installation of prefabricated building components using mobile cranes.