ABSTRACT
As the core of economic development in China, Shenzhen has been the city with the biggest urban floating population seeking for good working opportunities for the past decade, which has challenged public government of Shenzhen. Housing has been the biggest concern to almost every Shenzhen citizen. The government initiates an ambitious housing supply plan to supply more than 400,000 public houses for its 13th Five Year plan. However, Shenzhen is suffering from time, safety, labor shortages, environment protection and quality concerns to fulfill the supply plan. With its generally recognized benefits of faster processing, clean and safe working environment and good quality, massive production of prefabricated public houses is gaining momentum in the face of various challenges in the construction industry in Shenzhen. However, the benefits of using prefabrication cannot be cultivated without overcoming the inherent drawbacks of data fragmentation, processes discontinuity, poor interoperability between enterprise information systems and lack of real-time information visibility and traceability. At the same time, with the development of smart city, there is a lack of connection channels among continuously growing application systems of smart city. The exchange and share of the correlated data of smart city is not effective．To handle with these challenges, an Internet of Things-enabled cloud platform (IoTECP) is designed by integrating big data analytics systems with cloud computing and Internet of Things technologies to manage the massive production of prefabricated public houses in Shenzhen. Intelligent building element and smart gateway are defined and devised to collect real-time data throughout the supply chain of the production of prefabricated public houses including production, storages, logistics and on-site assembly. Captured data are uploaded to cloud platform to be processed and analyzed based on big data analytics systems, such that intelligent decisions could be made to inform managers involved in the massive production prefabricated public houses. Visibility and traceability modes are developed with building information modeling and virtual reality technologies, through which managers can supervise the construction safety, quality, progresses, and cost information for multiple projects in real time manner. The cloud platform can provide various tools and mechanisms and decision support services, to different stakeholders, thereby improving the efficiency and effectiveness of daily operations, decision makings and supervisions throughout the management of massive production of prefabricated public houses, it also provides universal and flexible public support for different integrated smart city applications, forming the backbone of our future Smart Cities with other intelligent systems.
