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Digital Twin for Sustainable Social Housing: Integrating BIM and MMC Towards Industry 5.0: Comparison
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Please note this is a comparison between Version 2 by Jade Zhou and Version 1 by Chathuri Widanalage.

MMC has been globally recognised as a promising solution for the current global social housing crisis, although persistent challenges remain in relation to limited early-stage design coordination and chronic design inconsistencies, which often cause costly post-design modifications. In response, digital twinning enabled through BIM has emerged as a compelling approach to tackle these challenges. BIM serves a transformative role in advancing sustainable social housing supply by integrating BIM with advanced smart technologies such as AR/VR, IoT, AI, and robotics. Nevertheless, significant constraints continue to impede a wide adoption of BIM due to technical capacity, organisational readiness, knowledge dissemination, and legal frameworks that support embracing BIM and associated smart technologies. Moreover, a notable knowledge gap persists in the application of BIM-enabled digital twinning across the entire project lifecycle of MMC projects, which may be addressed through the integration of Industry 5.0 principles with BIM, emphasising human-centricity, resilience, and sustainability as foundational pillars for future innovation.

  • BIM
  • MMC
  • Industry 5.0
  • smart technology
  • social housing
Social infrastructure plays a vital role in achieving Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) established by the United Nations (UN) under the 2030 Agenda for global prosperity and sustainability [1]. Among them, social housing supply has been recognised as central to achieving these targets, especially those related to no poverty (SDG 1), reduced inequalities (SDG 10), and sustainable cities and communities (SDG 11) [1,2][1][2]. However, growing popularity and rapid urbanisation have resulted in a housing shortage worldwide [3]. This has led to higher housing prices, thereby increasing demand for social housing and exceeding their supply owing to their lower financial burden and greater government support [4]. For example, the declining social housing supply in Europe has led to increased inequality and migration, with an overburdened rate of 11.3%, resulting in a demand for more than 450,000 affordable and energy-efficient housing units [5]. While affordability and homelessness are major issues in the Australian housing market, the National Housing Supply and Affordability Council declared that their social housing supply has been declining for over three decades, with the average waiting time exceeding 10 years in 2024 [6]. Furthermore, over 14 years of unfulfilled social housing supply in the UK have led to the sharpest end of a housing crisis, leaving over 150,000 children in temporary accommodations by 2024 [7]. This shortage has been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic and has led to an increase in remote working, causing households to relocate from central areas to suburbs and rural areas [8]. Furthermore, the pandemic’s impact on the economy has led to higher material prices and labour shortages, resulting in increased costs and prolonged durations for housing construction projects [6]. While the housing crisis must be promptly addressed, the construction of housing has been reported to have the highest environmental impact, accounting for 34% of material consumption, 30% of waste, and 37% of global carbon emissions [9,10][9][10]. This highlights the need to address the prevailing social housing shortage through affordable, fast, and sustainable solutions. Hence, Modern Methods of Construction (MMC) have been globally recognised as a solution for social housing supply, especially in the USA, UK, Australia, Singapore, and Hong Kong [11].
MMC can be defined as a range of methods that span from off-site and near-site pre-manufacturing to on-site process improvements, mainly focusing on modular construction, prefabricated panelised systems, and components. The latest UK government mandates to adopt MMC in their Construction Playbook 2022, the government guidance on sourcing and contracting public works projects and programmes where they aim to increase its adoption in social housing from the current 10% to 20% by 2028 with the support of their Affordable Homes Programme, serve as a leading example of the government’s interest in promoting this approach across its housing projects [12,13,14][12][13][14]. This is due to its ability to address the challenges in housing supply, reducing carbon emissions by 82%, achieving 20–30% energy savings, minimising waste to under 1%, reducing project time by 20–60% for quick supply, decreasing project costs by 20–40%, 70% less site labour, and improving both quality and health and safety [15,16,17][15][16][17]. However, recurring issues in prefabrication housing projects have impacted their performance, hindering their adoption and benefits.
MMC projects require early collaboration across the project team and seamless coordination across the supply chain to reach design freeze before moving to the manufacturing stage to harvest its full benefits [18]. However, failure to meet these requirements in projects has resulted in a lack of design, workflow and resource coordination, inefficient decision-making support systems, design errors, logistic delays, and post-design changes in MMC projects [19]. These issues can escalate into interface and connection problems in manufacturing and assembly; leaks and defects resulting from poor design coordination among structural, mechanical, electrical, and plumbing (MEP), and architectural plans; overlooked project requirements; and other defects that necessitate costly, time-consuming, and complex modifications in MMC projects [20,21,22][20][21][22]. In response to these challenges, digital twins enabled by Building Information Modelling (BIM) have emerged as a key solution for integrating MMC in the social housing sector, improving performance, sustainability, and value for money in projects [13].
A digital twin is a virtual representation of a physical asset or system that replicates real-world behaviour to facilitate smart management, design, monitoring, prediction, and optimised operation in the built environment. It comprises five main components: target and digital entity data (2D, 3D, and real-time data, as well as data modelling); setup for modelling, simulation, and analysis; infrastructure, including software, hardware, and other relevant tools that enable system operation; interfaces; and system governance [23]. Accordingly, the scope of digital twinning extends far beyond BIM, providing a user-centric functional platform that collects, processes, generates, and updates real-time data to monitor and evaluate the construction project process and asset performance [24]. However, BIM has been globally recognised as a necessary capability for the delivery of construction projects [25]. In MCC, BIM provides an advanced digital platform for managing critical elements of design, construction, delivery, and supply chain management in modular and prefabrication projects [26]. The diverse capabilities of BIM, including early design coordination and seamless communication across supply chains, make it effective in addressing the issues in MMC projects [27,28][27][28]. Furthermore, accurate 3D geometry and rich semantic information are critical components in the digital twin, whereby BIM models reflecting updated real-world data can be identified as an essential component for successful digital twins in the built environment [23,24,29][23][24][29]. As a result, BIM digital twinning with different technologies, including Internet of Things (IoT), sensors, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Virtual Reality (VR), and Augmented Reality (AR), offers a plethora of benefits, including 3D visualisation, stakeholder collaboration, efficient and effective decision-making, information management, automation, smart training, and virtual testing, which serve as major enablers in addressing the prevailing issues in prefabricated housing projects [30]. Hence, recent studies have emphasised its key role in paving the way for Industry 5.0, promoting its principles of human-centricity, supply chain resilience, and environmental sustainability in the construction industry [31].
According to the literature, the key directions for the construction industry to move towards Industry 5.0 include adopting automation and robotics, 3D printing and additive manufacturing, digital twinning (AR/VR, IoT, blockchain and smart sensors), BIM, smart materials and sustainability, and modular and prefabricated construction [32,33][32][33]. As a result, MMC has been recognised as the most supportive approach for Industry 5.0 in the construction industry [31], where BIM plays an integral and inseparable role in integrating these technologies into modular and prefabricated construction to improve sustainability and affordability in social housing supply [28,33,34,35][28][33][34][35]. This underscores the importance of exploring the role of BIM in MMC in facilitating a digital twin for sustainable social housing supply as a step towards Industry 5.0.

References

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