107: Concrete Construction for Social Housing in Colombia: Towards a higher productivity supported by the use of Digital tools and off-site processes.
Original title: Concrete Construction for Social Housing in Colombia: Towards a higher productivity supported by the use of Digital tools and off-site processes.

Research in ENGLISH

This paper presents the outcomes of a collaborative project between UK and Colombian researchers, aimed at increasing productivity and lowering emissions for the construction of social housing in Colombia, particularly when using concrete as the main building material. Based on the findings of a previous project that focused on the automation of concrete construction within the UK context, and following the implementation of interviews with local industry experts, the researchers analyzed the opportunities and challenges of incorporating digital technologies in order to improve the construction process, and found out that there was higher potential in the design and management areas rather than in the actual production of components, where standard prefabrication was perceived as the most fitting solution. This paper will introduce some of the advances in the project, which include a diagnosis of the challenges and obstacles of prefabricated systems used in construction, obtained from interviews with leaders and actors in the sector, a meta-analysis of barriers and opportunities of the use of concrete prefabrication in other contexts, the development of a typology as an example of an application developed as part of the project development, and finally a software tool to support the proposed case of application.
Concrete construction, Prefabrication, Social housing, FEA Analysis, Generative tools