An AIT alumnus edits a book
Dr. Abdul Samad (Sami) Kazi, an AIT alumnus 1996, and 2004 (School of Civil Engineering), and Chief Research Scientist at VTT - Technical Research Centre of Finland has recently completed editing a book on 'Open Building Manufacturing: Core Concepts and Industrial Requirements'.
Kazi, A.S., Hannus, M., Boudjabeur, S., and Malone, A. (2007) Open Building Manufacturing: Core Concepts and Industrial Requirements, ManuBuild. ISBN: 978-951-38-6352-4 (Print); ISBN: 978-951-38-6353-1 (Electronic).
The construction industry is primarily characterized as a craft-based one producing one of a kind products and services. Other manufacturing sectors such as aerospace and automotive sectors in comparison primarily rely on standardized components that can be configured and assembled to provide a specific product or service.
Open building manufacturing is an attempt to bring some of the salient features of efficient manufacturing to the construction sector. This should allow for significant savings in construction and maintenance costs, fewer errors and rework, more choices and value to the customer, new products and services that can be configured and assembled in mobile factories at construction sites, etc., as is reported in different chapters in this book.
This book contains 16 chapters, clustered under the themes of concepts, industrial requirements, and solutions and applications for open building manufacturing.
Concepts: The chapters under this theme cover the vision for open building manufacturing as seen by the ManuBuild project consortium, lessons learned on building concepts from industrial best practices, classifications of industrial building systems, and different approaches to the understanding and use of different concepts in open building manufacturing.
Industrial Requirements: The chapters under this theme focus primarily on different requirements for open building manufacturing. They cover different perspectives to building manufacturing architecture, stakeholder requirements, the need for open building maintenance, the need for use of stochastic process modelling to support open building manufacturing services, and the need for training and education to close the skills gap.
Solutions and Applications: This theme presents different initiatives in the form of solutions and applications of open building manufacturing concepts. The chapters present the operationalisation of open building manufacturing, how project culture influences performance, use of the Lego(tm) analogy for product and service engineering, reducing waste through prefabrication and user-oriented interactive building design.
You can find more information on the ManuBuild project and also opt to join its community of interest at http://www.manubuild.net.