Construction companies in Sweden have for many years been moving work from site to factories, especially in the timber housing industry. These factories are also installing more and more automated production lines calling for better integration between design and production. So far, design tools in the construction industry have often been developed without possibility of parameterization, design automation or connections to Computer Numeric Control (CNC). Much of recent research has also been focused on improving the information flow in the traditional building process due to the lack of integration with other tools used by different disciplines. Also, constraints imposed by developed building systems cannot not be easily transferred ‘upstream' the design process. This paper aims to investigate the management of information flow between architects, engineering and production in the design of industrialized building systems. Furthermore, the possibilities of parameterization and design automation is investigated for the implementation of rules and constraints imposed by the building system in design tools used by architects and engineers with the purpose of reducing non-compatible design solutions and to integrate the information flow with the engineering and production process. First, building systems are classified according to customer order decoupling point in the product specification process. Building systems classified as configure-to-order or select-variant are suitable candidates for implementing configuration systems. Then, the information flow is demonstrated in the configuration of a timber floor slab. It is concluded that the engineering design can be automated to a large extent using configuration tools if the architectural design obey the rules imposed by the building system. Also, the amount of data transferred between architect and engineer is reduced since much of the information and knowledge is transferred into formal computer interpretable knowledge.

Industrialized concept buildings such as Skanska's ModernaHus need advanced computer systems to support product configuration processes efficiently. The project phases composed of capturing requirements, design document creation, performance analysis, scheduling and all other activities need to be performed automatically at least to a certain extent in order to maximize benefits for the industrialized building process. This paper demonstrates the development of an automated building energy analysis software module which is going to be part of an experimental configuration system, based on the Skanska's ModernaHus concept buildings. The paper shows the process of software module development from specification, through the selection of system architecture and implementation to first results. The selected approach provides adequate level of flexibility to support re-use in a more complete experimental configuration system in the future. We conclude the paper with discussion on the software development, operation and integration of the module as well as on the first results of efficiency and on the possible further usage for design optimizations. We also show how future organizational and design team roles may shift from classic design tasks towards concept development tasks of product configuration systems when the goal is the implementation of industrialized construction processes.

This paper describes one of the prototypes of the ITBoF project "Implementations of Product Models based on IFC and BSAB" where a design software for the precast industry, IMPACT, has been used to demonstrate product model data exchange. The exchange is based on IFC version 2.0 and the Swedish construction industry classification system BSAB 96. The objective of the project was to explore information exchange between architects (and/or HVAC engineers) and precast concrete designers using existing versions of IFC in commercially available software. The IMPACT prototype imports the wall geometry from the architectural design with openings for windows, doors etc. The precast designer uses the geometry to create precast concrete elements that make-up the composed walls. The refined model, containing precast elements, can be exported according to the IFC standard where the BSAB classification codes is adapted on to the IfcWall object as an IfcClassificationList. The BSAB classification codes can then be used to exchange information with estimation and scheduling programs. The exchange scenario clearly demonstrates the use of information exchange in the design of precast concrete elements. Also information exchange based on IFC 2.0 can with relatively small efforts be introduced in commercially available design tools such as IMPACT. However, future development must also focus on automatic adjustment of the product model data to reduce the supplementary work needed in the precast design process, especially in the exchange between the architect and the precast designer.