Abstract
There is an urgent need to increase the environmental, economic, and social sustainability of buildings. Indeed, construction has one of the lowest rates of sustainability among productive sectors, associated with high energy demand and pollutant emissions, frequent cost increase and time delays, and poor and unsafe working conditions. Building prefabrication is a construction technique that can enhance the sustainability of buildings, in terms of predictability, product and process quality, and increased safety for workers. Recently, new approaches and concepts such as Industry 4.0 (Construction 4.0) and circularity of resources emerged in the field of prefabrication to potentiate the benefits of off-site construction. In this scenario, the scope of the work is to analyze the state of the art in the field of prefabricated building technologies in the light of these innovations and to evaluate their performances from a sustainability perspective. The work has been developed in two phases: (1) analysis of 13 case studies of prefabricated technologies in Europe; (2) comparative assessment of their sustainability performances according to 21 qualitative parameters. Based on the results of the work, a set of guidelines is proposed as the outcome, i.e., suggested strategies and approaches for designers and industry professionals that can be used to enhance the sustainability of prefabrication.
Highlights
Since the beginning of the 19th century, building prefabrication has emerged as an alternative strategy to traditional construction
In the second phase, we developed a qualitative assessment and comparison of sustainability performances achieved from each case study
This research defines a decision-support tool for designers and industry professionals involved in the prefabrication sector
Summary
Since the beginning of the 19th century, building prefabrication has emerged as an alternative strategy to traditional construction. Prefabrication is a construction technique according to which parts of the building are assembled and completed inside a factory, transported and installed on-site [1]. The degree of prefabrication varies from the assembly of structural components to the integration of finishes in prefabricated elements (fixtures, cladding); the highest degree of prefabrication are three-dimensional modular units, i.e., building sections completed in the factory with finishing and technical systems already integrated. The use of such techniques has been proven to have several benefits for the building process [2,3,4]: . Predictability, because construction activities are led within a controlled environment where it is possible to carry out tight quality controls over prefabricated components; Time and cost reduction, because construction activities are no longer affected by external conditions (e.g., weather, site accessibility, etc.)
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