Risks hinder the role of prefabricated construction (PC) in promoting construction automation. Although existing research has focused on risk management (RM) in PC, the lack of a global perspective has affected the effectiveness of RM. Accordingly, this paper adopts a scientometric analysis to review the knowledge domain of RM in PC. A total of 144 articles were selected from the Scopus database for journal citation analysis, document co-citation analysis, and keyword co-occurrence analysis. The results show that since 2011, the annual publications show an overall upward trend. International Journal of Construction Management, Journal of Building Engineering, and Buildings have been cited more frequently recently. PC research, RM research, environmental sustainability research, and ergonomic research provide a solid foundation for the research on RM in PC. Existing studies are conducted from five knowledge themes, namely, Supply chain and industry, Decision and optimization, Safety and health, Environment and overheating, and Investment and cost. Further, current research content, future research needs, and RM strategies for PC practices are discussed. This study helps stimulate further promising research and enhance the effectiveness of RM in PC in practice.

Prefabricated construction (PC) has been regarded as a sustainable construction method for its inherent advantages such as energy savings, emissions reductions, and cleaner and safer working environments. However, PC development has been hindered by its inherent weaknesses of fragmentation and discontinuity. Effective interface management (IM) is regarded as integral to PC project success for its appropriate management of numerous interfaces with high complexity and uncertainty among the organization, information, and logistics. Although some researchers mentioned the effectiveness of IM for PC projects, systematic assessment methods for IM performance are missing. This study aims to systematically develop a framework to assess the IM performance of PC projects to address this gap. Through a comprehensive literature review, nineteen indicators of IM performance were identified and grouped into four categories. By combining the objective weighting method of an ordered weighted averaging (OWA) operator with the set pair analysis (SPA) method of uncertainty assessment, a nineteen-indicator assessment model was developed. Finally, a case study was constructed using the proposed framework, and the feasibility and applicability of the OWA-SPA model were proved. The assessment results provided by the assessment model could guide project managers for better IM and serve as a valuable reference for researchers in the construction industry.

With the development of information technology, many industries have greatly improved their production efficiency. At the same time, production efficiency in the construction industry has not only failed to grow, but is actually on the decline. The main reason for this problem is interoperability, which is the exchange and sharing of construction project information between the participants and the different application software in the project life cycle. At present, Building Information Model (BIM) is considered to be an effective way to solve the problems in the construction project life cycle. The integrated BIM information is a significant improvement in all processes where project participants have to use and communicate complex, accurate and interrelated construction project information. This paper first expounded the background, which is during the construction project life cycle management. The degree of information sharing and collaboration of construction units is low, which is the main reason for low efficiency in the construction industry. Then, a BIM-based information integration model is proposed. The information interchange of construction units is realized in this model. The efficiency of project management is improved.

In China, common quality fault control of construction manual is widely accepted for solving quality fault. However, the present manner to solve different types of quality faults requires extracting useful information manually, it is time-consuming, lacking efficiency and prone to error. To conquer the problems, this paper presents a model of ontology-based common quality fault of construction. In the proposed model, control manual of common quality fault of construction is selected as main knowledge source, and extracted hierarchy and relationship of context information from the knowledge source is represented by ontology model. A reasoning framework presented in this paper leverages ontology for structuring knowledge about phenomenon, reason, precautions and improvement measure of quality during construction. Based on inputted quality fault a reasoning mechanism is put forward to identify fault’s phenomenon, inference corresponding reason, precautions and improvement measure. And the quality fault ontology is validated by case study. Finally, the limitations of the proposed method and future research directions are discussed.

Web-based data mining is an emerging technology that is increasingly being applied in Decision Support Systems in many industries. The objectives of this study are to develop a Web-based text mining system specific to the building and construction industry for web content gathering, handling and analysis. An authoritative website in the housing industrialization field is chosen as a case on which to carry out this study by means of four steps, as follows. First, a web crawler module for gathering the original web articles has been constructed. Second, the web content processing module is used to parse the HTML tags and segment the text content of each page. Then, the relational database deployed in a cloud platform is used to store the processing result. Finally, the Vector Space Model and TF-IDF algorithm are used to represent articles and calculate the relationship among all the articles gained in the web crawler module. As the government issues the news and policies online continuously, it is possible for people to know the key points and trends embodied in these policies in time by way of the proposed text mining system.