Turning point to transform the construction industry

Construction market accounts for £ 15 trillion equal to 14% of global GDP, and expected to increase by 3 to 5% per year, if the global markets continue to recover and heal from previous recession. Long before Covid-19 – for the last few decades’ construction industry has long been experiencing the productivity stagnation; poor quality; significant occurrence of waste associated with human intervention and its supply chain, and high level of risk with relatively low profit margin.

Research suggest that China will become the world leading of construction industry in the next five years with a output of $2.5 Trillion. Anecdotally said, if America sneezes, Europe catches a cold – what happens to the world when a major supplier as China contracts Covid -19? The underlying concern for the pandemic is if this snowballs into a long-term global recession. This will inflict the risk of a profound global recession, with a significant impact on long-term construction.

The heterogeneous characteristic of construction environment has been embedded with high level of fragmentation and intricate activities among different contributors. The high level of fragmentation is driven by a plethora of micro businesses in which makes construction environment very complex to manage. Yet, effective interaction among different players in different stages of completion process with a broad spectrum of information in the fragmented ecosystem of construction is difficult to understand and, elaborate among majority of actors. This has exacerbated the level of collaboration and communication in which causing the level of productivity to decline in recent decades.

Giving the context, the construction industry still is operating in a conventional way of constructing and, compare to other industries, the rate of innovation and innovative adaptation has always been elusive and/or obsolete. This has directly affected both cost and scheduling of projects.

The exponential growth of technologies has created a new avenue to improve the overall performance of construction industry. Automation in construction industry with emerging technologies such as VR, AR, Robotics, Offsite manufacturing and 3D printing has enabled us to change the trajectory of traditional methods of constructing buildings.

A report indicated that the proportion of the world population living in large cities would surpass 70% by 2023. Most of countries are under indisputable pressure to deliver more housing to meet the increasing demand in the near future. As a consequence, this illustrates the clear need for deployment of emerging technologies to meet the increasing demand.

Construction is labour dominated market – where robotics could potentially boost the level of productivity and eliminate error and waste within construction industry. The shortage of (skilled) labour has accelerated the potentiality of human replacement with robots. This can close of the gap to enable the industry to keep pace with increasing demand despite a shrinking workplace.

Number of factors is signalling the way towards increasing of automation in construction industry. I tried to summarise the top four technologies that could tap into the market to which we will see across the industry.

I. The rise of VR & AR in construction sites

Identifying errors, omission and mistakes are the prominent motives for contractors including sub-contractors for employment of virtual reality to improve the productivity and workflow of each process. Digitisation has enabled projects to visualise and interact with subject to reduce errors before moving into the stage of execution.

The contextual awareness of these two technologies enhances the process of information retrieved by providing a mechanism to filter and services, therefore, removing redundant data and allowing the user only to see relevant information.

The design process has helped to overcome most difficulties usually encountered during the construction of residential buildings. Contractors can benefit from such techniques by knowing exactly their clients' requirements in time and make provision for them. There will be no doubt in making choices and decisions on what material, equipment, colour, size and design of utility installed on the building, thus, saving time and potential cost incorporated with waste and rework.

II. Robotics

It is well understood that the degree of automation is relatively low in construction industry. The shortage of skilled labour has affected the level of productivity and workflow of process. This has propelled the industry to re-think the conventional way of building through the employment of automation.

Usually building construction consists of a defined set of activities; these are including; handling, coating, concreting, measuring and last assembling in iterative steps. The final assembly of building components heavily rely on labour. The most striking impact robotics have had in building construction has been on off-site fabrication – the operation was on a controlled environment.

Employing robots on construction sites, in particular for iterative activities can be plausible from the technical performance and economic perspective. Robotics for straightforward and repetitive tasks in building construction is more economical than conventional methods. The level of fragmentation in housing industry present infinite opportunities for automation.

III. Off-site manufacturing

The construction industry is moving towards manufactured housing – making the process more automated. This will make labour redundant to work onsite construction, also, make construction scalable, cheaper to build, more energy efficient to operate and more importantly faster to complete.

One of the significant benefits of fully automated off-site manufacturing in construction projects is to eliminate human errors, as well as preventing the adversity of site condition, therefore, reduces the site congestion – resulting to remove operatives from dangerous site environment to controlled environment with better working condition.

Methodology of prefabrication has many compelling advantages over in-situ construction method such as: higher precision, more energy efficient, lower cost, and shorter time of completion. The ability to personalise “infill” enables customisability to specific user needs, avoiding past failure (e.g., in the 60s) of one-size-fits-all modular home construction.

IV. 3D Printing

Despite countless of advantages of such technology, the uptake of 3D printing in construction industry has been limited and neglected, as opposed to other industries such as aerospace and automobile industry. 3D printing technology can maximise the productivity in offsite and onsite construction to maximise the speed with minimum error, addressing the inflexibility of design and undertaking activities with greater precision. Another aspect of 3D printing is to support lean construction practices, in which continuous improvement can add value to each step of the process and consequently reduce waste and defects.

3D printing in the filed of aerospace and manufacturing is making the cost more affordable than ever before, which can be expected to increase the profitability by 10 fold in construction through acceleration of operational process. The ability to print a complex structure with least waste, freedom of design, fast prototyping, transform manufacturing and supply chain processes are the main advantages of utilising 3D printing in construction projects.