ABSTRACT
The construction industry has a low productivity rate of raw material input and about 40–50 per cent of global raw materials are used for the construction of our environment. Construction waste represents the largest waste fraction even in highly industrialised countries and buildings are among the most expensive goods that we produce. Although we have achieved high effiency in the production of complex high-tech products as cars and computers, we have not brought the production of simple low-tech products such as buildings to a comparable level. An alternative method to conventional construc tion is the large-scale deployment of industrialisation, enabled by applying automation and robotics based processes and technologies throughout all phases of the life cycle of built environments. The present chapter first analyses best-practice industrialisation/automation and building production projects, which have been tested or applied successfully in larger scales during the last decades. Furthermore, the chapter derives from that analysis a framework for combined on/off-site building production as an approach for managing sustain able and resource efficient construction processes. Strategies from the presented framework are currently applied by the authors of this chapter to various projects around the world.
