Production of customized and standardized single family timber houses – A comparative study on levels of automation

• Industrialization of house building implies a higher pre-fabrication level where companies have moved from the traditional on-site to the off-site assembly. Currently in Sweden there is an increasing demand for all types of households and the companies from this construction sector lack the capacity to respond to these needs. Increasing the productivity through automation is one of the ways to address this problem. Nevertheless, introducing automation solutions without the structured analysis of the production system can lead to sub-optimization. In the analysis of processes, obtaining the current state of levels of automation has proven to be a useful step towards the identification of possible automation solutions. Producers of single family timber houses often have different business strategies, therefore their processes can differ with respect to how standardized the products are. The single case study was used as a research method and has the following research question: How different are the processes and current levels of physical and cognitive automation within the off-site assembly of exterior walls in ETO and SV projects? Both assembly lines currently have rather low physical and cognitive automation levels. However, there are tasks with higher levels of physical and cognitive automation in the ETO assembly line.

Ämnesord

TEKNIK OCH TEKNOLOGIER  -- Maskinteknik -- Produktionsteknik, arbetsvetenskap och ergonomi (hsv//swe)

ENGINEERING AND TECHNOLOGY  -- Mechanical Engineering -- Production Engineering, Human Work Science and Ergonomics (hsv//eng)

Nyckelord

levels of automation

industrialized timber house building

exterior wall

off-site assembly

modify-to-order

select-a-variant

Publikations- och innehållstyp

ref (ämneskategori)

kon (ämneskategori)