Design for lean manufacture of low-cost housing

Overview

Off-site building manufacturing has the potential to reduce an overall building cost. Lean manufacturing processes are beneficial to offsite construction through their capacity to mitigate and control the variability that is inherent to building design. Improvement to building manufacture processes requires an amount of concurrency between process improvement measures, as any one process in isolation may not have the required benefit to a larger system. The research aims to develop a system for lean building manufacture processes as well as developing a framework to achieve this. The focus of the research is on the development of a moving assembly line for low cost multi storey buildings and the application of lean principles to manufacturing processes. The research uses an integration of system dynamic modelling and multi objective optimisation to minimise time and cost in building manufacturing. The simulation models are validated by factory observations and assembled to simulate moving assembly line manufacturing processes.

Key outcomes

The reduction of time and cost in offsite construction as a result of the implementation of advanced manufacturing techniques such as moving assembly lines.

Research team

• Fraser Paxton
• Prof Lu Aye
• Dr Felix Hui

Research partners and collaborators

• Bondor