Investigating the Impact of the Prefabrication Concept on the Design and Selection of Building Components, Case Study: Peripheral Walls in Mass Housing Projects

Abstract

Today, Prefabrication is considered as one of the concepts of industrialization in response to the growing needs of human societies for development. It is particularly important to address this concept in mass housing projects. The most important goals in adopting the prefabrication approach are to increase construction speed and quality and reduce costs. A review of the literature on prefabrication illustrates the importance of Design for Manufacturability and Design for Assembly concepts about components of prefabricated systems. In this regard, this research has been carried out to identify the criteria and indicators for selection of prefabricated peripheral walls and to design a system based on updatable databases to select proper options according to the importance of criteria and indicators in various mass housing projects. The research method is descriptive-analytical. The results indicate the necessity of involving building material suppliers in designing the mentioned system. Therefore, it is envisaged to continuously import new material specifications in the form of suggested options by the material suppliers in the system’s database. The criteria and indicators of peripheral wall selection extracted from the literature review of prefabrication and an Analytic Hierarchy Process structure is proposed to obtain the appropriate options considering the importance of criteria and indicators. To determine the scoring criteria for options, on the one hand, the standards set for the technical specifications of materials were discussed and on the other hand, samples including materials and Peripheral wall systems were investigated based on the prefabrication criteria.