Flexible Construction Systems (FCS)

The need to increase safety, productivity, quality and efficiency in construction is a challenge to researchers to seek and develop bold innovative changes. Technological adaptation of successful concepts from other industries into construction, offer an important path for innovative progress. This paper will provide an insight into some aspects of Flexible Manufacturing Systems (FMS) a concept developed by the manufacturing industry. The study of FMS shows that many of its relevant features, such as the concepts for automated process planning production control, and materials handling, are transferable into construction. If one is willing to accept the fact that many of the construction operations are repetitive in nature, requiring only limited flexibility of the production unit(s), a wide range of construction tasks are ready to be automated. It is a reasonable assumption that many fallacies can be avoided by learning from experiences gained in developing FMS for manufacturing. This approach was taken for developing concepts for Flexible Construction Systems which include all fixed or semifixed production operations found in construction. The objective of this paper is to introduce some basic issues related to integrated materials handling and production control and how they were applied in developing an automated truss production facility.