Synchronization for Prefabricated Building Modules with Graduation Intelligence Manufacturing System

Abstract: Planning, scheduling, and execution (PSE) is crucial for the on-time delivery of prefabricated modules in Modular Prefabricated Construction (MPC). In prefabricated production and off-site fit-out, various uncertainties lead to production PSE losing effectiveness, resulting in prolonged construction periods and increased costs. However, a stable and resilient fixed-position production mode with high applicability that meets the characteristics of prefabricated production is lacking. Under the context of Industry 4.0, this research proposes Graduation Intelligent Manufacturing System (GiMS) to facilitate flexible handling uncertainties in real-time. IoT-enabled prefabricated production is designed for achieving real-time visibility and traceability. A multistage self-adaptive decision-making mechanism, which comprises spectral clustering for planning and real-time ticket sequencing for scheduling and execution, is developed to improve the performance of synchronization decisions under large fluctuations in operation time. A numerical study is conducted to evaluate the performance of GiMS. The results demonstrate that a considerable improvement in reducing tardy jobs and decreasing mold table idle time can be achieved compared to the two traditional methods. Sensitivity analysis is carried out to investigate the impacts of fluctuation of operation time and the number of mold tables. We found that GiMS possesses excellent potential to cope with uncertainties and an optimal resource allocation for modular prefabricated production. This proposed methodology fills the gap in fixed-position prefabricated production synchronization and increases the applicability of the decision-making mechanism in real construction projects.