Production of customised and standardised single family timber houses - A comparative study on levels of automation

Paper in proceeding, 2016

Industrialization of house building implies a higher pre-fabrication level where companies have moved from the traditional on-site to the off-site assembly. Currently in Sweden there is an increasing demand for all types of households and the companies from this construction sector lack the capacity to respond to these needs. Increasing the productivity through automation is one of the ways to address this problem. Nevertheless, introducing automation solutions without the structured analysis of the production system can lead to sub-optimization. In the analysis of processes, obtaining the current state of levels of automation has proven to be a useful step towards the identification of possible automation solutions. Producers of single family timber houses often have different business strategies, therefore their processes can differ with respect to how standardized the products are. The single case study was used as a research method and has the following research question: How different are the processes and current levels of physical and cognitive automation within the off-site assembly of exterior walls in ETO and ATO projects? Both assembly lines currently have rather low physical and cognitive automation levels. However, there are operations with higher levels of physical and cognitive automation in the ETO assembly line.