Development of a Modular and Integrated Product-Manufacturing-Installation System Kit for the Automation of the Refurbishment Process in the Research Project BERTIM

The manufacture-installation of prefabricated modules for the refurbishment market needs to be lifted to a more integrated, systemized and automated level, in order to transform the existing buildings stock towards near zero energy consumption at reasonable cost. In building renovation, prefabricated modules have to be industrially customized to each building, and therefore, standard prefabrication and refurbishing approaches have to be re-conceived. In that sense, the automotive industry is a good example of combining modular products and manufacturing processes. Within the research EU-funded research project BERTIM, research institutes and companies are developing an interdisciplinary, cross-country approach for this challenge. In this research project, the goal of a dedicated work package is to ameliorate the existing holistic renovation process, by a combination an integration of robotic, automation and augmented reality technologies. Basically, the final objective is to reduce time and cost of the current process of the manufacturing and installation of 2D and 3D modules significantly (by 30% or more). For the development of this research, the Axiomatic Design method has been used, which is a matrix based method. Here, the main requirements and design parameters are expressed mathematically. The objective of applying this method is to define a scientific approach to the re-conception of the prefab modules and the manufacturing and installation processes, and therefore find an optimal solution for every decomposed requirement.