Direct Digital Construction: A Concept for Digitalizing Operations in the Construction Industry

Abstract

Direct Digital Construction is a new concept aiming at capturing opportunities from emerging technologies leading incremental improvements over time. It is the construction work and other value adding operations over the life cycle that are done directly from the design model. We develop such a concept in order to obtain the maximum benefit from the architectural design, reusability and an increased efficiency while not compromising the cost and quality requirements. The traces of the complete and partial examples of the concept can be seen in the recent practices in the selected construction related case companies from Finland. Although many of the buildings have resembling designs, reuse of the designs is not very common in construction industry. However, the end product of construction projects are different from what has been designed. Direct digital construction concept aims at addressing issues such as incomplete designs, lack of standardization and traditional project based nature of current construction industry. Design theory, pillars of product design and manufacturing gas well as logistics and management of life cycle issues were considered during the study. Alternative ways reducing dependency on skill such as Modularization, Prefabrication, Customization, Standardization as well as design and manufacturing technologies such as Direct Digital Manufacturing (DDM), Additive manufacturing, CNC Laser Cutting, CAD, RFID, Virtual Reality (VR) were touched upon and evaluated in the course of this study.