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Evaluating the adaptability of an industrialized building using dependency structure matrices

journal contribution
posted on 2017-08-31, 14:59 authored by Robert Schmidt III, Kasper S. Vibaek, Simon Austin
A relatively neglected aspect of sustainable development is the creation of an enduring built environment that can be adapted to suit changing circumstances. This presents a significant challenge: how to evaluate a building's adaptability. The premise is introduced that adaptability is enhanced through the use of analytical tools which can provide better control of the building's system architecture that enables easier, and less costly, user-driven adaptations. More specifically it investigates what a dependency structure matrix (DSM), a square (N × N) matrix-based model that visualizes the relationships between elements within a system, can reveal about the capacity for an industrialized building to accommodate change, through clustering and impact analyses. Clustering analysis attempts to assess the system architecture on generic principles of change by organizing it into discrete modules, while the impact analysis examines propagation in 30 change scenarios by tracing dependencies within the DSM. Feasibility assessments of the scenarios are compared with the knowledge of a system expert. The results indicate the DSM analysis provided insights beyond the intuition of the system expert regarding change propagation, while the system expert's knowledge of component characteristics and overall composition of the building proved beyond the capacity of the DSM. Additional conclusions are drawn from the case study regarding DSM construction and the analytical process.

Funding

The research has been graciously funded by the Loughborough IMCRC (Innovative Manufacturing and Construction Research Centre) through the EPSRC (Engineering Physical Science Research Council).

History

School

  • Architecture, Building and Civil Engineering

Published in

Construction Management and Economics

Volume

32

Issue

1-2

Pages

160 - 182

Citation

SCHMIDT, R., VIBAEK, K. and AUSTIN, S., 2014. Evaluating the adaptability of an industrialized building using dependency structure matrices. Construction Management and Economics, 32 (1-2), pp.160-182.

Publisher

© Taylor & Francis

Version

  • VoR (Version of Record)

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Acceptance date

2013-09-17

Publication date

2014-03-20

ISSN

0144-6193

eISSN

1466-433X

Language

  • en