Digital end-to-end configurator for residential real estate development (DIG-CON)

Description

The Swiss housing market is experiencing significant challenges due to rapid demographic growth, limited available land for development, stringent planning regulations, protracted and uncertain approval processes, and the inefficiency of the construction phase. This creates pain points for a number of different stakeholders, including investors (due to uncertainty and high risk in each development), the labour force (due to unsttractive working conditions), planners (due to frustrating and inefficient iterative planning process) and the environment (due to time and costs constraints favoring the use of CO2-intense materials).

This project makes a significant contribution to the solution of the housing problem by establishing a modern, digitally-enabled method for the design and delivery of multi-family housing. It incorporates the principles of design for manufacturing and assembly with a digital configuration logic to produce optimized reference projects for multi-family housing, responding to local construction laws, site constraints, and market requirements.

Each project's performance is analyzed in terms of its functionality, programme, areas, book of materials, finance, constructability, sustainability and circularity. The solution uses automated spatial analysis, a generative kit-of-parts configurator and AI-driven optimization to develop and evaluate diverse scenarios. This approach will help avoid deterministic and repetitive layout designs while maintaining the advantages of the adoption of modern methods of construction, such as cost and time savings, resource efficiency, and data-driven design optimization.

Key data

Publications