Challenges and opportunities for material recovery and reuse in the construction & demolition industry in Zuid-Holland and the role of Blockchain

Urban areas are becoming more densely populated. More than 50% of the global population is already located in them. The Netherlands is among the countries with the highest population density. In 2017, 80% of its population was living in urban areas. It is expected that by 2050 the Netherlands will need between 300’000 and 1.6 million new homes....

A conceptual model to determine the impact of off-site construction on labour productivity

Despite the efforts of governments and firms, the construction industry is trailing other industries in labour productivity. Construction companies are interested in increasing their labour productivity, particularly when demand grows and construction firms cope with labour shortages. Off-site construction has proved to be a favourable policy...

Subversive machines: Designing architectural freedom through open systems

This project forms an exploration of the way in which architecture, as a discipline, might come to a distinctly architectural application of computational design techinques. In particular, it questions the external nature of these techniques to the field, and how the discipline might come to formulate its own critical technicity. This is...

Lean Toolbox Approach for Effective Preparation of Housing Refurbishment Projects Using Critical Success Factors

Refurbishment projects notably for social housing are special kinds of project for many reasons, including inflexible existing stock, low available budgets, involvement of residents staying in their homes during construction. Lean tools could be helpful not only during construction, but also in the preparation of projects including requirements...

Decision support for offshore asset construction using expert judgments for supply disruptions risk

Offshore asset construction is a complex and costly process that is subject to various uncertainties within the entire supply chain. Hence, both the construction management optimization and the reduction of deployment expenditures should be supported by automated decision support models which include proper representations of predominant...

Robots at the construction site: An adjusted business model for construction companies

Context - After the recession of 2008, the real estate market is picking up again. Amongst others due to the urbanisation and the increasing world population the real estate demand is growing. However, the current scarcity of workforce in the construction industry might become a huge issue in the future. In order to deal with the future real...

Smart sensors in asphalt: monitoring key process parameters during and post construction

The Fibre Bragg Gratings (FBG) technology based on integrated photonics, offers specific benefits including thermal mapping, damage detection, shape- and distributed sensing. This makes it useful for determining pavement behaviour during extreme weather conditions e.g. freeze-thaw cycles when harsh winter conditions could damage the asphalt...

Scenarios for effective climate change adaptation in Dutch social housing

Housing managers are constantly confronted with the changing demands that their building stock has to comply with. One of the change agents is the changing climate, caused primarily by human induced greenhouse gases. Though, even if the emissions of all these gases could now be put to a hold, the process of climate change would not completely...

The central role of the construction sector for climate change adaptions in the built environment

Over the past years, research has clearly enunciated the necessity of adaptation to climate change in the built environment. Policy is being developed on national and municipal levels to have adaptations implemented. However, for the actual application of the measures, property owners are the actors that have to commission the construction...

Sustainable Construction

Sustainable construction is about a new manner of thinking. This research defines a sustainable construction process as a cyclic manner of organizing a process, opposed to the current construction process which is organized in a linear manner. The achievement of a sustainable construction process involves various obstacles. This research...

Ground movements generated by sequential twin-tunnelling in over-consolidated clay

The expansion of urban populations comes with an associated demand for increased public transport. An often utilised solution is to construct a rapid transit system within tunnels. Generally, a pair of tunnels are constructed within relative close proximity. The construction of these tunnels will generate ground movements which have the...

Concrete shell structures revisited: Introducing a new 'low-tech' construction method using vacuumatics formwork

This paper provides a new perspective on the construction process of concrete shell structures and introduces a new cost saving approach for constructing (single curved) concrete shells using Vacuumatics formwork.

Standardizing knowledge: A dialective view on architectural knowledge and its managers

Many organizations within the construction industry are currently developing standardized practices. Increased standardization involves new ways of organizing construction projects, changing interrelations between professional groups, setting a new culture, i.e. challenging the institutionalized way of being. It, for instance, leads to a...