Can off-site manufacture improve productivity in construction?

24 April 2018 - Professor Jennifer Whyte, Director of the Centre for Systems Engineering and Innovation at Imperial College London, gives oral evidence at The House of Lords Science and Technology Committee into its inquiry into Off-site manufacture for construction.

Professor Whyte argued: "You cannot change technologies in production without changing business and procurement models. We have known that for a while."

She added: "There is a need for a fundamental research base as we move to more digital fabrication techniques."..."There are opportunities around technologies like AI and robotics as we move forward that I think is important that we have a research base to support. We also need a skills base to support advanced manufacturing techniques."

How the risk profile is different in offsite vs traditional construction is currently being studied by Zheng Guo, a fourth year MEng student at Imperial College London, supervised by Professor Jennifer Whyte. Please contribute to this research by completing this survey, which is based on her review of the literature (and identification of risks in this literature). Contact us at csei@imperial.ac.uk if you have any questions about this work.