TY - JOUR
T1 - An ontology-based cost estimation for offsite construction
AU - Vakaj, Edlira
AU - Cheung, Franco
AU - Cao, Jianpeng
AU - Tawil, Abdel Rahman H.
AU - Patlakas, Panagiotis
N1 - Funding Information:
This research was supported by an Innovate UK funded project (Project no. 104798) “Collaborative Knowledge-Based DfMA approach to building cost efficient, low impact and high performance houses”. The authors would like to thank the participating industrial partners of the research project including Walsall Housing Group, Hadley Group, QM systems, and Northmill Associates and Energy Systems Catapult.
Publisher Copyright:
COPYRIGHT: © 2023 The author(s). This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
PY - 2023/4/1
Y1 - 2023/4/1
N2 - Design for manufacturing and assembly (DfMA) has been widely applied to support the decision-making process in offsite construction. With a DfMA approach, cost estimation requires taking product design and production processes into consideration. Current studies conduct cost estimation built upon quantity take-offs. However, they do not provide a vocabulary to relate cost estimates to offsite construction processes. This paper presents a new domain ontology, Offsite Housing Ontology (OHO) using the NeOn methodology framework to support cost estimation considering products, resources, and production processes. OHO semantically defines offsite construction domain terminology and relationships. This supports a unified model, required for efficient collaborative design management. The efficiency and effectiveness of the OHO approach are demonstrated in a real-world DfMA scenario through the development of a Knowledge-Based Engineering tool to automate cost estimation. The approach can be adapted and extended to accommodate a very wide range of offsite housing, delivering important optimization and automation benefit from DfMA solutions.
AB - Design for manufacturing and assembly (DfMA) has been widely applied to support the decision-making process in offsite construction. With a DfMA approach, cost estimation requires taking product design and production processes into consideration. Current studies conduct cost estimation built upon quantity take-offs. However, they do not provide a vocabulary to relate cost estimates to offsite construction processes. This paper presents a new domain ontology, Offsite Housing Ontology (OHO) using the NeOn methodology framework to support cost estimation considering products, resources, and production processes. OHO semantically defines offsite construction domain terminology and relationships. This supports a unified model, required for efficient collaborative design management. The efficiency and effectiveness of the OHO approach are demonstrated in a real-world DfMA scenario through the development of a Knowledge-Based Engineering tool to automate cost estimation. The approach can be adapted and extended to accommodate a very wide range of offsite housing, delivering important optimization and automation benefit from DfMA solutions.
KW - Offsite Construction
KW - Ontology Engineering
KW - Building Information Modeling
KW - DfMA
KW - Linked Building Data
UR - https://www.scopus.com/pages/publications/85158057822
UR - https://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85158057822&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.36680/j.itcon.2023.011
DO - 10.36680/j.itcon.2023.011
M3 - Article
SN - 1874-4753
VL - 28
SP - 220
EP - 245
JO - Journal of Information Technology in Construction
JF - Journal of Information Technology in Construction
ER -