Process automation for flexible residential wall panel manufacturing

Abstract

Modular construction has gained momentum in North America as an emerging construction paradigm in recent years. Modular buildings are assembled from components that are prefabricated in manufacturing plants and transported to the construction site for assembly. The current manual-based approach to modular construction, which typically applies the traditional stick-building-under-a-roof building method, involves time-consuming and labour-intensive tasks. However, the application of automated prefabrication of components has the potential to significantly advance the productivity, worker safety, and competitiveness of the Canadian construction industry. This research, focusing on the construction of wood-framed panels, presents a methodology which allows intelligent wall panels with different design properties to be analyzed. By integrating external databases with building information modelling (BIM)-based software, generating wall panel combination plans and assembly information, and developing modularized wood wall-framing machinery, the automated machinery is able to implement the intelligent wall panel prefabrication target. Featuring a case study as the approach to identifying the advantages, the study of panels in a sample house from an Edmonton-based panel manufacturer is thus employed in order to explain the effectiveness of the proposed methodology.