While Industry 4.0 is starting to gain momentum in manufacturing, it has not been widely explored within construction. Research is required to develop an entirely new capability – the adoption of Industry 4.0 approaches throughout the construction value chain. This requires new thinking, technologies, processes and business models to ensure that the sector transforms to Construction 4.0 and delivers a step change in technology adoption, decision support and use of data.
Consideration of mātauranga Māori
It needs a uniquely Aotearoa approach that considers our unique data requirements – for example, taking into consideration sustainability, affordability, durability and resilience, policy and legislative, design and mātauranga Māori contexts. As part of the MBIE Endeavour research programme Developing a Construction 4.0 transformation of Aotearoa New Zealand’s construction sector led by the Heavy Engineering Research Association (HERA), the Smart Construction research team will address a challenging design manufacturability problem to support the advancement of Aotearoa’s construction sector towards its digital transformation.
Data key to smarter construction
The Smart Construction programme within the Construction 4.0 project will investigate the intrinsic properties and invariant signatures of construction objects such as footings, slabs and beams as well as their synergistic structural performance to create a new end-to-end computational platform for design and manufacture.
This opens the door to full automation of prefabrication and modularisation, significantly improving building performance, environmental profile and sector productivity.
Finding intersectionality
The invariant signatures of a building are its intrinsic properties such as geometry, location and materials that distinguish it from other things and that do not change regardless of software used, type of modelling decisions and cultural contexts. This concept is the prevailing approach used in construction globally.
However, within the context of Aotearoa, another way of looking at connections and intrinsic properties exists. This other perspective exists through te ao Māori (the Māori world view). To date, the building and construction sector has paid very little attention to this although it may be argued that architects are leading the change in this regard. A key part of the Construction 4.0 project is identifying where these two worlds can intersect in construction practice through data- informed decision support and the associated data requirements to achieve this.
Weaving together two world views
The aim is to weave together the intersection of Māori world views, which recognise and protect connections to ancestral ecosystems, alongside a Cartesian points-based geometric analysis identifying relative location and orientation and mechanical properties of materials, systems and buildings. This weaving together of different paradigms will support a universal interoperability of building information data to promote Māori and non-Māori concepts and values alongside each other.
For example, to create a smart process from file to factory – from design to production and off-site construction – te ao Māori emphasises the importance of understanding the whakapapa (origins) relating to where and how materials are created and sourced and atua (gods) that each material and natural phenomena (for example, wind, earthquake and fire) relate to.
Therefore, by studying the intrinsic properties and invariant signatures of architecture, engineering and construction objects such as footings, slabs, walls, beams and columns and the structural performance of them working compositely, we could taxonomically categorise them, as we do now, and also classify them in accordance with whakapapa and relationships to ngā atua. Such an understanding will help create an end-to-end computational platform intersecting Māori and non-Māori knowledge for smarter design and manufacture of buildings.
Finding a new standard of practice
Existing research efforts to address the lack of manufacturability of design in the building sector have been heavily focused on standardisation and semantic modelling. However, these standardised methods do not consider Māori ways of classifying data or making decisions based on that data. For example, Māori may ask ‘Which is the best system to use to support Papatūānuku (Earth mother) and Ranginui (sky father) to reduce our ecological impact?’
The existing sectoral approach is to perform a life cycle assessment that may consider impacts on the domains of Papatūānuku (such as soil impact) and Ranginui (such as air quality). These two approaches are not in principle mutually exclusive. The research opportunity is to identify the intersectionality of the two to be adopted as the new standard of practice.
The whakataukī (Māori proverb) ‘nāu te rourou, nāku te rourou, ka ora ai te iwi’ translates as ‘with your basket and my basket, the people will thrive’. It stresses the importance of working collaboratively together to find better solutions to support intergenerational wellbeing of all.