Cloud Asset-enabled Prefabrication Transportation Service for public housing production in Hong Kong

Abstract

Prefabrication construction heavily relies on the efficiency and effectiveness of transportation since all the precast components must be delivered from prefabrication production manufacturers to construction sites for final assembly. Aiming at improving the operations and decision-making processes during prefabrication transportation, this paper proposes a Cloud Asset-enabled Prefabrication Transportation Service (CAPTSE), which could effectively facilitate the cross-border transportation in delivering these precast components. Several innovations are highlighted in CAPTSE. First of all, the concept of cloud asset is adopted to wrap various construction resources involved in the transportation phase, so that they could be uniquely identified, have the ability to sense their real-time status, and be managed remotely. Secondly, a rich set of services is developed in CAPTSE based on Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) which makes it an easy-to-deploy and flexible-to-access platform. Based on these services, different stakeholders in prefabrication transportation are able to make decisions efficiently according to the real-time data collected. Finally, a case study is presented to demonstrate the feasibility and practicality of CAPTSE in Hong Kong.