Design for manufacturing and assembly (DfMA) has been widely applied to support the decision-making process in offsite construction. With a DfMA approach, cost estimation requires taking product design and production processes into consideration. Current studies conduct cost estimation built upon quantity take-offs. However, they do not provide a vocabulary to relate cost estimates to offsite construction processes. This paper presents a new domain ontology, Offsite Housing Ontology (OHO) using the NeOn methodology framework to support cost estimation considering products, resources, and production processes. OHO semantically defines offsite construction domain terminology and relationships. This supports a unified model, required for efficient collaborative design management. The efficiency and effectiveness of the OHO approach are demonstrated in a real-world DfMA scenario through the development of a Knowledge-Based Engineering tool to automate cost estimation. The approach can be adapted and extended to accommodate a very wide range of offsite housing, delivering important optimization and automation benefit from DfMA solutions.

The performance gap between simulation and reality has been identified as a major challenge to achieving sustainability in the Built Environment. While Post-Occupancy Evaluation (POE) surveys are an integral part of better understanding building performance, and thus addressing this issue, the importance of POE remains relatively unacknowledged within the wider Built Environment community. A possible reason that has been highlighted is that POE survey data is not easily understood and utilizable by non-expert stakeholders, including designers. A potential method by which to address this is the visualization method, which has well established benefits for communication of big datasets. This paper presents two case studies where EnViz (short for “Environmental Visualization”), a prototype software application developed for research purposes, was utilized and its effectiveness tested via a range of analysis tasks. The results are discussed and compared with those of previous work that utilized variations of the methods presented here. The paper concludes by presenting the lessons drawn from the five-year period of EnViz, emphasizing the potential of environmental visualization for decision support in environmental design and engineering for the built environment, and suggests directions for future development.

Post-Occupancy Evaluation (POE) is an important component of a cyclical design process that allows cost savings and promotes accountability of designers, owners, and users, as well as allowing identification of facilities issues and informed decision-making. It is reasonable to expect that the combined effect of new data-gathering technologies and the increasing urgency of sustainable building design will be that POE studies will increase and, eventually, be applied at a mass scale. Digital Curation (DC) allows for the long-term preservation and constant re-use of research data. Yet there has been no attempt so far to develop a DC strategy for POE data. This paper introduces the concept of Digital Curation and relates it to objective, quantitative POE data. A combination of a literature review and a questionnaire sent to expert respondents is utilised in order to identify data types and major Digital Curation issues relevant to POE. A Digital Curation Model (DCM) for POE data is presented, drawing from the existing models, examples, and best practice available, intended to act as a framework that enables the storage, archiving, management, recovery and utilisation of such data on a mass scale. Finally, the importance, benefits, obstacles and implications of developing a suitable DC strategy for Post-Occupancy Evaluation are discussed.

Timber is a material with significant potential which, however, is underutilised in professional practice. One reason for this is a relative lack of software that would help practitioners handle the complexity of new design codes such as Eurocode 5. This paper documents the development of a structural timber design software package that evolved from research software developed at the National Technical University of Athens. The jump from research to practice introduces significant challenges in both structural and software engineering. There is a requirement for a multidisciplinary approach throughout the project team as structural engineers need to be able to write code that is efficient and easy to maintain. Identifying the exact problem to solve is particularly important as a balance must be struck between optimisation, usability and programming complexity. Finally, the testing process, including the identification of appropriate source data, plays a key role. Despite the challenges, however, the development of specialised software for niche markets remains a viable option for the evolution of research projects as the infrastructure requirements are relatively low and the continuing integration of information and communication technology in civil and structural engineering will generate new opportunities for researchers.

This paper introduces a novel mass timber construction (MTC) system and presents the results of an initial exploration of its structural performance. This system is called Interlocking Glued Solid...