A holistic review of off-site construction literature published between 2008 and 2018

Abstract

Off-site construction has become an emerging research domain in the recent decade. Through a holistic review approach incorporating scientometric analysis and follow-up in-depth qualitative analysis, this study contributes to the body of knowledge in off-site construction by summarizing the latest research keywords and main research topics. This study also identifies the current gaps in research and practice, as well as proposing future research directions in this research area. Off-site construction is a domain that can be extended to cross-disciplinary research from the perspectives of engineering, management, and technology. Existing research have been focusing on many research disciplines, such as structural behaviors and joint connections of prefabricated components, scheduling and planning of off-site activities, as well as performance evaluation of off-site construction. However, further research is needed in integrating the emerging digital construction technology, integrated project delivery method, lean construction, and the issues of sustainability of off-site construction. There are already limited studies linking off-site construction to the concept of Design for Manufacturing and Assembly. Future research should also adopt a larger database and allow for comprehensive evaluation of off-site construction performance.

A Conceptual Development Framework for Prefabricated Construction Supply Chain Management: An Integrated Overview

“…The product and technology of off-site construction Jin et al (2014) [18] Offsite construction 349 Management practices; process; product; performance; research method; technology From Table 1, four main aspects of PC research can be summarized.…”

“…Keywords reflect not only the core themes of the literature, but also the main content of a particular field [18]. So, through the keyword co-occurrence experiment, the focus of current PSCSM field can be found.…”

“…Finally, PCSCM research topic relational network is generated as shown in Figure 5, which contains 24 nodes and 132 links. Based on the frequency and co-occurrence probability of keywords, the 24 keywords shown were further divided into clusters with different node colors by VOS Viewer, which has been practiced in many literatures [18]. For example, as shown in Figure 5, yellow node cluster includes RFID, BIM and technology, etc.…”

Regional Comparisons of Contemporary Construction Industry Sustainable Concepts in the Chinese Context

“…Besides BIM, other construction practices are experiencing an increase in their application in the international construction industry and these include prefabricated construction, public-private partnership (PPP), design-build (DB) and green building [23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31]. Klotz [32] describes prefabrication as: "... the manufacturing of parts of a building in a factory before being brought to the site for incorporation in the finished structure.…”

“…As suggested by Jin et al [28,29], the questionnaire survey approach was selected based on the facts that: (1) it enabled a quantitative analysis and allowed the cross-city comparison among the three case study cities; (2) it provided a standardized tool that future studies can be built upon and in return offer a higher degree of validity and reliability of the current study. Two major types of questions were designed in the questionnaire, including multiple-choice and Likert-scale questions.…”