41 Research themes

This theme explores the strategic alignment, transformation leadership and management to enable total ecosystem perspective of value alignment through either platform or integrated project delivery. The value proposition within the theme provides a roadmap and evaluation canvas to transform into a very competitive value (supply/demand) network (and value receiver/contributor) and collaboration that leads to a cultural shift for a sustainable competitive advantage.

This theme will bring expertise, applied research, and evidence-based practices that can facilitate change and transformation of the construction industry, its associated stakeholders, and its managers and workforce. The expertise spans areas of engineering, management, design and economics, among others, and will help with conducting collaborative projects with industry partners to develop, test and integrate innovative practices in their work.

The Safety Theme will leverage opportunities brought about by new construction practices and technology interruptions to improve construction safety and change the way safety is handled in the whole project lifecycle, making construction a safer and healthier work environment.

This theme covers all matters relating to the procurement of building projects with a particular focus on commercial arrangements and leveraging opportunities from digital developments. Issues of interest stem from all phases of the project lifecycle, from planning, feasibility and risk allocation, tender processes and negotiation, through to project management, performance and delivery.

The traditional construction industry is highly fragmented and competitive, but not efficient. It is also marked by profound gender and diversity imbalance. Shifting the industry to support greater collaboration and innovation involves shifting the culture attending to gender and other diversity at all levels. All prospective projects need to consider their culture and diversity implications.

This theme has the expertise, experience and capacity to inquire into consumer technology adoption of emerging technologies and consumer information processing, to model and optimise consumer user experience and customer centric business models, and to develop analytical and collaborative tools to enable customer centric transformation.

Finance and Property Development Economics is a multi-disciplinary theme including the core expertise and experience in finance and economics, but also in property development, valuation and customers’ preferences. This theme can contribute to feasibility estimations and viability studies of property development or community development projects. Market and customer analyses, finance, profit and return estimations, and cost calculations are part of feasibility studies.

Building 4.0 CRC has a common policy and regulatory thread – ‘More Effective Governance, Policy and Regulation in the Building Industry’. The Policy & Regulatory Theme provides the expertise, experience and capabilities to develop conducive policy, governance and regulatory settings to support the CRC’s broad vision and specific projects.

This theme will provide Building 4.0 CRC with surety in achieving objectives and maximising the value via a proactive, systematic, and holistic process.

Transforming the building sector aims to address the challenges faced by the global and complex supply chain through increasing the transparency and visibility of the operations, enhancing the traceability and reliability of the supplied materials, and optimising the effectiveness and efficiency of the logistics systems. This theme draws cross-disciplinary experts from business and operation management, manufacturing, and transportation, to procurement and contract, and information technology, in order to provide a holistic view of the entire system.

The energy theme explores energy use and generation technologies in construction practices and products towards meeting carbon neutrality goals in buildings and organisations.

The environmentally sustainable design (ESD) theme focuses on defining design solutions to minimise the environmental impacts of buildings before, during, and after occupancy.

This theme aims to protect all building occupants and maintain healthy indoor environments. It is interdisciplinary, incorporating perspectives from building physics; engineering principles from environmental, chemical and mechanical domain; and management components. The scope of This theme covers a range of emerging topics in urban environments, such as developing energy efficient pathways to healthy buildings, improving resilience of buildings to extreme weather events, and assessing the cost benefit of green building technologies, to name a few.

The life cycle assessment (LCA) theme looks at strategies and methods to quantify and minimise the environmental impacts of buildings, from the extraction of raw materials until their end-of-life stage.

This theme will further the structural, thermal and construction performance of a range of sustainable materials, in turn providing less carbon-intensive solutions for buildings.

This theme focuses on the automation and improvement of decision-making in the building industry, such that it is safe, robust, and cost and resource efficient.

This theme focuses on the performance of building after construction. The performance can be defined based on a range of criteria, from environmental and energy aspects to reliability and occupant satisfaction. To meet the performance objectives, these criteria need to be considered from the early design stages.

This theme aims to automate traditional building design processes by rapidly generating and optimising numerous designs early in the conceptual phase through computational techniques.

This theme will enhance home automation and security systems for the Building 4.0 CRC platform, including ensuring data privacy, revealing security vulnerabilities, and identifying potential threats.

This theme will put particular emphasis on Digital & Automated Fabrication, Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning, Computational Design, Optimisation, as well as Modelling & Simulation, where novel robotic systems can boost the efficiency and reduce the time and cost for infrastructure construction, daily operation and maintenance.

This theme’s research focuses on embracing computer-integrated technologies in design and construction project management. It will also focus on the design and development of VR/AR/MR, and Serious Game applications for workforce capacity development towards optimisation of coordination, progress monitoring, and building assembly at the construction site.

Digitising Physical Assets concerns the development of methodologies and technologies for efficient mapping and 3D as-built modelling of buildings and construction sites. The Theme involves researchers from the three universities as well as industry partners participating in the CRC, who offer collective expertise in various areas related to digitisation, 3D modelling, and visualisation of physical assets.

The longer-term objective of This theme is to integrate existing planning, regulation and policy into a platform to facilitate and speed up automatic checking, compliance testing, and approval. State and local government, developers, architects, building surveyors and builders will use this technology to check approval and certification.

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a network of sensors, smart devices and computational resources connected via the Internet for monitoring, controlling and actuating processes in real-time. IoT sensors form the core interconnecting backbone between our physical world (sensors) and the digital world (“digital twin”) in the construction industry.

This theme provides a foundation for the development of a fundamentally new approach to building that is based on a platform approach to: product development; stakeholder co-ordination; continual improvement; and the processes required to achieve this future. Platform-based opportunities lie in: the articulation of product platforms for construction; the use of platform-based approaches to new sections of industry, such as construction logistics; the development of integrated value-chain software platforms; and the possibilities of platform-based business ecosystems as an alternative to construction’s traditional project structures.

This theme will leverage the most recent and capable technologies to support human activity at the centre of activities during all stages of the building lifecycle. This includes the design and invention of effective human interfaces, intuitive data visualisations, and interactive human-in-the-loop analysis tools.

Design for Manufacture and Assembly (DfMA) is a concept that was developed in the manufacturing industries to address production problems through product design, enabling manufacturing cost and speed improvements. The Building Design and DfMA theme is aimed at identifying the ways in which design can contribute to more efficient production of buildings (faster, easier, cheaper, less wasteful) and ultimately, better designed outcomes.

This theme underpins building innovations. It introduces high-performance materials and systems that solve industry problems cost-efficiently, with no compromise to end-user wellbeing. 

Construction sites are by nature unstructured and dynamic environments; the complex interaction between structures, materials, equipment, and workers is not often effectively monitored and managed. This theme aims to develop and validate state-of-the-art technologies and processes to connect construction resources to facilitate real-time and precise monitoring, control and optimisation of construction projects.

This theme is a key enabler for the future, integrating smart processes and real-time data collection and analysis. The construction research is focused on optimising project performance measures such as delivery time, cost and quality.

This theme explores the relationship between fire-safe buildings and industrialised construction. It focuses on understanding the fire performance of building compartments and facade systems by assessing their flammability and associated fire spread hazards. It also studies novel material products used for construction, such as engineered timber and bamboo.

The design research expertise offered by the Housing and Urban Design theme provides a vehicle for generating and testing innovative approaches to housing design, delivery and assessment that operate across the scales of building componentry, dwelling typology, site assembly, development precincts and urban systems. The collaborative and multi-scalar nature of design research has the capacity to synthesise complex stakeholder inputs into site-specific and applied project outcomes, supporting the CRC’s aims to affect the whole value chain by integrating digital, sectoral and building transformations.

The planning system is highly entwined into the building procurement process, interceding multiple times throughout the course of delivering a project. The uncertainty the planning systems introduces to timing, through delays in obtaining approvals and community objections, are considered a significant risk in building construction and a barrier to efficient development processes. Concurrent with these criticisms, the relative clarity and certainty of receiving planning approval in Australia’s capital cities is noted to be a competitive advantage when attracting overseas developers to build and invest in Australia. Clarity and certainty within Australia’s planning systems are therefore critical elements of the building procurement process and the building industry’s future development. For Australia to successful move towards a Building 4.0 industry and improve building phases, it is important to address the potentials for advancements and barriers to efficiencies that exist within Australia’s planning systems.

With a combined expertise in structural modelling and computational mechanics, our Structural Optimisation Theme has the capacity to develop and optimise structural systems for building, bridge and other infrastructure applications.