Towards Physical Internet-enabled prefabricated housing construction in Hong Kong

Ray Y. Zhong, Yi Peng, Ji Fang, Gangyan Xu, Fan Xue, Weiwu Zou, George Q. Huang

Research output: Journal article publicationConference articleAcademic researchpeer-review

31 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Préfabrication could provide various benefits for housing production, including lower the cost, improve the management efficiency and quality, ensure the safety, and realize sustainability. However, to fully acquire these benefits in real world construction process, challenges still exist on real-time tracing and tracking of the préfabrication components, and getting real-time interactions among all the stockholders. Physical Internet (PI), as has been well adopted in logistics, could be an effective solution for real-time visibility. Based on the préfabrication practice in Hong Kong, this paper proposes the architecture of an Pi-enabled prefabricated housing construction which upgrades and transforms the préfabrication construction so that the logistics echelons could be seamlessly integrated and synchronized, together with a Pi-enabled decision support system (DSS) which uses Internet of Things (IoT) and cloud techniques for designing the architecture and a rich set of services and tools to assist different decision makers. Firstly, three stages of préfabrication construction have been analyzed in detail to point out current challenges. Secondly, the technical framework of Pi-enabled Building Information Modelling (BIM) Platform (PIBIMP) is developed. Finally, a case study is given to demonstrate the working process of our proposed solution, and the effectiveness of it has also been verified.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)1079-1086
Number of pages8
JournalIFAC-PapersOnLine
Volume28
Issue number3
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 1 May 2015
Event15th IFAC Symposium on Information Control Problems in Manufacturing, INCOM 2015 - Ottawa, Canada
Duration: 11 May 201513 May 2015

Keywords

  • Logistics and supply chain management (LSCM)
  • Physical Internet (PI)
  • Prefabricated housing construction
  • RFID
  • Smart construction objects (SCOs)

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Control and Systems Engineering

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