Design requirements for prefabricated mechanical and plumbing systems

Abstract

Prefabrication has been shown to increase the productivity and minimize waste in the field of construction more than 30 years ago. Regardless of these identified benefits of prefabrication, its implementation on the mechanical and plumbing disciplines remains largely absent in the Finnish construction industry.

The aim of this thesis is to identify the technical design requirements needing fulfillment for prefabrication of mechanical and plumbing systems. The thesis also contains a tentative solution to how the identified design requirements can be fulfilled. The design science research methodology is utilized in this thesis to develop a practical solution for the research problem. The thesis consists of two case studies and a modeling experiment. The two case studies involved evaluation of operators utilizing prefabricated mechanical and plumbing systems and evaluating their design requirements. Based on the identified requirements utilized by the operators, a modeling experiment tested whether the identified requirements can be fulfilled with established design software. This study has identified three concepts enabling prefabrication of mechanical and plumbing systems and demonstrated that the requirements can be achieved with established design software.

The identified concepts found in this study enabled the proposition of a design science artifact, that enables the design of prefabricated mechanical and plumbing systems through a certain workflow. The artifact was furthermore validated with the descriptive validation procedure. The proposed artifact indicate that prefabrication of mechanical and plumbing systems is possible through implementation of new workflows in the design process.