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Wee, Tanawan; Aurisicchio, Marco

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Abstract:

The construction industry is experiencing further industrialisation and embracing mass-customisation. The development of modularisation approaches to tackle product planning is crucial for the achievement of mass-customisation. However, research on modularisation in construction is limited. There is therefore a need to develop more advanced modularisation approaches to address product planning issues. Breaking down a modularisation problem provides a better understanding of its dynamics and drivers. This paper proposes an approach to address multiple modular drivers in construction. The modular drivers addressed in this paper include: technical specification, manufacturing and common unit. Multiple modularisation tools were utilised including the design structure matrix (DSM), the generational variety index (GVi), the coupling index (Ci), and the Cost Weighting (CW). These tools were utilised both for natural clustering and objective driven clustering. The modularisation tools were implemented on a plant-room case study. The work stresses and addresses the importance of understanding the fundamentals of a modularisation problem as well as the formulation of an effective solution

Keywords:

construction, modularisation, product planning, mass-customisation, technology strategy