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Purpose The purpose of this paper is to show the feasibility of blockchain technology to perform as an infrastructure for improving built asset sustainability by providing all the necessary information for better decision making at all the stages of its life cycle. Design/methodology/approach Blockchain technology can be used as a tool to build a reliable and secure decentralized information system to capture and disseminate all the data required for different sustainability assessment models. A model is designed and tested through a synthetic scenario to substantiate the research objective with empirical work. Findings It is shown that blockchain can revolutionize the current state of knowledge for long-term sustainability thinking and provide necessary information in different stages of the life cycle of a built asset. With the proposed decentralized, transparent and comprehensive database using blockchain, the life cycle assessment methods can become much more inclusive and reliable. The new holistic analysis of the built asset sustainability enables better decision making in design, build, operation and demolition of each asset. Originality/value This paper proposes and tests a model for using blockchain as an infrastructure to support built asset sustainability. Practitioners from different backgrounds at different stages of a built asset life cycle can use such a network to make better decisions and better assess the sustainability of their built assets.

In developed countries, buildings are involved in almost 50% of total energy use and 30% of global green-house gas emissions. Buildings' operational energy is highly dependent on various building physical, operational, and functional characteristics, as well as meteorological and temporal properties. Besides physics-based building energy modeling, machine learning techniques can provide faster and higher accuracy estimates, given buildings' historic energy consumption data. Looking beyond individual building levels, forecasting buildings’ energy performance helps city and community managers have a better understanding of their future energy needs, and plan for satisfying them more efficiently. Focusing on an urban-scale, this study systematically reviews 70 journal articles, published in the field of building energy performance forecasting between 2015 and 2018. The recent literature have been categorized according to five criteria: 1. Learning Method, 2. Building Type, 3. Energy Type, 4. Input Data, and 5. Time-scale. The scarcity of building energy performance forecasting studies in urban-scale versus individual level is considerable. There is no study incorporating building functionality in terms of space functionality share percentages, nor assessing the effects of climate change on urban buildings energy performance using machine learning approaches and future weather scenarios. There is no optimal criteria combination for achieving the most accurate machine learning-based forecast, as there is no universal measure able to provide such global comparison. Accuracy levels are highly correlated with the characteristics of forecasting problems. The goal is to provide a comprehensive status of machine learning applications in urban building energy performance forecasting, during 2015–2018.

Building operational energy, mobility energy, and materials embodied energy contribute to a significant portion of the global greenhouse gas emissions. Buildings stand at the intersection of these three contributors and, as a result, are largely responsible for the scale of society’s carbon footprint. The global consensus on limiting climate change to a 2o Centigrade temperature increase is forcing nations to become carbon-centric and to adopt a range of carbon-neutral strategies in their building standards and codes. However, most of these standards define carbon-neutrality only in terms of energy efficiency, with very few organizations introducing a holistic approach for assessing the built environment carbon footprint. Mobility of tenants, for instance, has been indicated as a carbon hotspot by several studies. Thus, several green building standards have been inclined to include mobility emissions in the short-term future. However, emissions from daily transportation of a building’s occupants are rarely measured and explored by building LCCO2A studies, thus the share of mobility emissions compared to embodied and operational emissions is not well-known. In this paper, we consider embodied, operational, and mobility of tenants as Carbon Intensive Stages (CIS). The study attempts to (1) quantify and compare the CIS of a building, and (2) propose a framework to facilitate the quantification of the carbon footprint of the building environment. We provided a case study on an US educational building, where we found that building operational phase accounted for 70% of the total carbon emissions, followed by mobility (24%) and embodied carbon (6%). These results help better understand the weight of mobility emissions in the built environment and, in fact, suggests that mobility, operational, and embodied carbon should be targeted as the triple bottom line of building carbon footprint assessments and highly encouraged by green building certification standards.

New offsite construction practices are emerging in the construction industry to address a broad set of productivity issues that cut across organizational, technological, and strategic domains. Despite all its benefits from sustainable and economic perspectives, offsite construction still faces significant resistance from both the construction industry and the built-environment market. Evaluating advances in this industry is critical, especially because there is a need to determine the factors that are preventing the industry from more fully and rapidly adopting offsite strategies. This paper aims to investigate the industry perspective regarding the adoption of offsite strategies and provide an understanding of the development of the offsite construction industry over time. In this regard, the “State-of-the-Art of Modular Construction Symposium” was held in May 2017 at the University of Florida with the intent to bring together stakeholders engaged in multi-trade prefabrication to debate the drivers, challenges and future directions of the offsite industry. During this event, data was collected by means of unstructured interviews and a questionnaire for the purpose of determining the characteristics the U.S. offsite construction industry. A SWOT framework was used to assess the strengths and weaknesses of the industry adopting offsite strategies as well as the external opportunities and threats. The questionnaire survey data analysis showed the current drivers, core elements, barriers, and possible solutions to the barriers of further implementation of offsite construction. The results are intended to help construction organizations understand the potential benefits of offsite construction and assist them in creating a roadmap for their future strategic development.

Manufactured Housing (MH) is the process of producing building units or entire buildings in an offsite factory and transporting them to the site for installation and assembly. The application of advanced manufacturing technologies into the housing process not only will increase productivity, but also can provide a safer work environment, stable work location, long-term growth opportunities, and career progression for employees. Today, the MH workforce is facing problems with worker quality and retention. The rising demand for MH indicates the need for training a multi-skilled labor force for this industry. This paper evaluates the essence of an educational program for MH industry and discusses the rationale for training the MH workforce in comparison to conventional training programs. In response to the stated problem of Inadequate training programs, the curriculum for Training Manufactured Construction (TRAMCON) was developed by the University of Florida and delivered throughout Florida by the TRAMCON Consortium. While the quantitative results in labor performance improvement in the factory plants have not yet been established, the major strengths and challenges of the program are discussed.

Offsite construction is facing slow adoption despite the fact it can be a suitable solution for addressing historical problems faced by the construction industry, such as labor shortages, construction safety, time and costs overrun, and waste. The controlled factory environment creates room for innovation similar to the techniques used in the manufacturing industry. Yet, as always, the progress and adaptation of innovative ideas are challenging in the construction sector. A growing role for off-site construction requires further research and development. More collaborative efforts, industry meetings, and academic symposia are needed to bring together different disciplines and bridge the current information gap. This paper aims to present the outcomes of the äóěSymposium on the State-of-the-Art of Modular Constructionäóť held in Gainesville, Florida from May 4th to 5th, 2017 that aimed to bring together major stakeholders in modular construction. It includes an analysis of the lectures and the survey that was distributed to industry and academic experts during the symposium. Also, it investigates the state-of-the-art of modular construction and focuses on the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats that come with this building technique.