Improving Performance and Collaboration for Offsite Construction through Learning between Projects and Knowledge Reuse

Summary: Offsite construction (OSC) is a promising solution to address the housing affordability and supply challenge in New Zealand (NZ). However, most OSC is still ‘new’ and untested in NZ and cannot effectively reduce costs, time and risks, which hinders the broader use of OSC across the country. It has been revealed both in the literature and by interviewing industry experts that OSC knowledge learnt from previous projects is highly valuable to new projects; however, currently the designers, engineers and contractors do not effectively capture and reuse knowledge from existing projects. In this project, we propose to affect industry-wide behaviour change for capturing and reusing OSC knowledge, through developing an open OSC knowledge base, a best practice guideline and multiple case studies. Additionally, a longitudinal survey will be conducted to evaluate how effective the proposed knowledge base and guideline can affect OSC professionals’ behaviour change on knowledge reuse.

Funder: Building Research Association of New Zealand (BRANZ)

Team: Yang Zou (PI), Johannes Dimyadi (Codify Asset Solutions), Brian H.W. Guo (University of Canterbury), Roy Davies (University of Auckland), Lixin Jiang (University of Auckland)

Duration: 2023-2025