oa Developing realistic sustainable strategies for automated construction

The construction industry is increasingly experimenting with new automated construction techniques covering every aspect of the delivery process, from design through to operations. Technology is evolving fast, but understanding of the true benefits, sustainable implications, and practical implementation strategies remains limited. Despite numerous demonstration projects, which claim significant advancements and successes, industry-wide adoption has been lacking. However, many of the claims made by manufacturers, implementers, and sponsors are selective in the reporting of the project outcome, meaning that trust is reduced and wider adoption is constrained. This study explains the current functional limitations and misconceptions across a range of automated construction technologies, including 3D printing, robotic construction, pre-fabrication, and system control. It also examines the sustainability implications of the different strategies across all three core sustainable components to ask whether these methods really make a positive difference. The objective of the study is to provide a complete practical guide for the global construction aiming at how automated strategies can be adopted and why they should be adopted, along with guidelines for their use. Coupled with these strategies are a series of proposals for the manufacturing sector to consider, in order to develop equipment and systems that can be of greater functional benefit for the construction sector. Where genuine benefits are identified, these are examined to see how they could potentially be expanded to produce even greater sustainable rewards.