Exhaustive Exploration of Modular Design Options to Inform Decision Making

Europe is facing an increasing demand for new construction, which is pushing the industry away from traditional construction technology towards prefabrication and Mass-Customization. However, prefabrication-based construction requires a more efficient, better informed decision making process due to the increased difficulty of on-site variations. Furthermore, the lack of means to navigate the whole spectrum of solutions for a given design problem using traditional tools, and the absence of the manufacturer's input in the early phases of the project can present significant challenges for the efficiency of the design and construction process. As a way to face these challenges, this paper presents an approach, realized as an Autodesk Dynamo-for-Revit package called Box Module Generator (BMG), which enables the exhaustive generation of configurations for a given building based on a construction scheme that utilizes Box Prefabricates. The output can be sorted, dissected and explored by users in various ways and the building geometry can be generated automatically in a Building Information Modeling environment. This makes it possible for the projects' stakeholders to browse thousands of potential design alternatives, which would otherwise be very hard to explore manually, or using traditional parametric modelers.