Offsite Production and Manufacturing for Innovative Construction: People, Process and Technology

The offsite and modular market is continuing to grow. This book builds on the success of a number of initiatives, including formative findings from literature, research and development and practice-based evidence (success stories). It presents new thinking and direction from leading experts in the fields of: design, process, construction, engineering, manufacturing, logistics, robotics, delivery platforms, business and transformational strategies, change management, legislation, organisational learning, software design, innovation and biomimetics. This book is particularly novel and timely, as it brings together a number of cogent subjects under one collective ’umbrella’. Each of these chapters contain original findings, all of which culminate in three ’Key Learning Points’ which provide new insight into the cross-cutting themes, interrelationships and symbiotic forces that exist between each of these chapters. This approach also provides readers with new contextualised understanding of the wider issues affecting the offsite market, from the need to embrace societal challenges, through to the development of rich value-laden solutions required for creating sector resilience.

Content includes a balance between case studies and practice-based work, through to technical topics, theoretical propositions, pioneering research and future offsite opportunities ready for exploitation. This work includes: stakeholder integration, skills acquisition, new business models and processes, circularity and sustainable business strategies, robotics and automation, innovation and change, lean production methodologies and new construction methods, Design for Manufacturing and Assembly, scaled portfolio platforms and customisability, new legal regulatory standards and conformance issues and offsite feasibility scenario development/integration.

Jack S. Goulding is Professor of Construction Project Management at the University of Wolverhampton (UK) and Joint Coordinator of CIB W121: Offsite Construction. He works closely with industry developing new business models, strategies and change programmes, including technology transfer, organisational learning and offsite manufacturing.

Farzad Pour Rahimian is an Associate Professor at Northumbria University (UK), with expertise in the mainstream areas of: BIM, IT Integrated Design and Construction, Virtual-Reality, Automation, Simulation and Optimisation. He has led various publicly funded research projects, supervised numerous industry-based PhD students and published more than 120 research outputs.