Product Complexity Analysis of Hybrid Panelized-Volumetric Prefabricated Buildings

Abstract

Modularization aims to decompose a building or system into modules of components with controlled interdependencies to allow for the parallelization of their design tasks and the transfer of the work from the construction site to an efficient offsite manufacturing environment. However, these design and construction benefits of modular building decomposition may result in increased complexities that amplify the impact of design changes. This study proposes a quantitative methodology for assessing the complexity of hybrid building modularization strategies that combine the use of volumetric and panelized modules. The methodology integrates novel graph-based modeling schema, graph algorithms, a hybrid modularization modeling approach, and a structural complexity metric. The proposed methodology was assessed using an illustrative project case. The main contributions of this study is the development of a graph-based modeling approach for hybrid modularization and a quantitative approach for assessing the complexity of modularized buildings.