A Systematic Review of Applied Information Systems in Industrialized Construction

Industrialized construction (IC) is the process of producing prefabricated systems, building components, or building structures in a protected factory environment and transporting them to the construction site for installation or assembly. The IC process engages an enormous amount of information from different sectors of industry, including design, supply networks and materials management, planning and scheduling, and fabrication/manufacturing. While manufacturing and automation studies are commonplace in many sectors, the construction industry remains one of the least industrialized sectors. IC has emerged as a viable solution for most historical problems that the construction industry has faced. The purpose of this paper is to review the state-of-the-art of information management systems applied to IC in order to identify challenges and problems for further studies. Systematic search and screening procedures were used to identify relevant publications using major databases, including EBSCO host, ScienceDirect, Web of Science, ASCE, Emerald, and ProQuest. Challenges and problems of the selected articles were classified in the four main areas of “design and planning,” “fabrication,” “supply chain management,” and “setting and assembly.” This study reveals that while technologies are evolving, there is still a gap in the application of technologies and measurement of their benefits.