Towards Physical Internet-enabled prefabricated housing construction in Hong Kong

Abstract

© 2015, IFAC (International Federation of Automatic Control) Hosting by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.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.