Date/Time
Date(s) - 03/24/2025
10:30 AM - 11:30 AM
Location
365C Weil Hall - ESSIE Conference Room
Categories
Speaker: Dr. Qian Chen, Assistant Professor, Department of Civil Engineering, The University of British Columbia
Abstract: The construction industry is racing forward with its efforts to exploit
digitalization and automation. The future they are pursuing is one that will have
construction projects, i) started and completed in record times with minimal disruption to
the project stakeholders, ii) completed on budget with virtually no waste of construction
materials or negative impact on the environment, and iii) that will result in infrastructure
of impeccably high quality. This wonderful future will be achieved by automating many of
the mundane and failure-prone activities on construction sites, enhancing the visibility of
all supply chain activities from design and fabrication to onsite installation, and ensuring
that there is fast and failure-free information exchanged between stakeholders. This
seminar introduces several computationally integrated supply chain methods to achieving
this future, which includes 1) BIM-IoT technological frameworks to improve material flow
visibility and 2) an adaptive BIM-robotic fabrication approach to expedite design and
production processes to reduce rework. Different use cases of prefab projects were
demonstrated using these proposed methods to showcase the transparency and agility in
projects, paving the way for a better future of construction projects.