Overview of the Characteristics of the Modular Industry and Barriers to its Increased Market Share
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Modular and offsite construction approaches reduce project duration and cost by synchronizing offsite and onsite work. Project activities are undertaken in a controlled offsite facility to minimize the effects of inclement weather and site disruptions, while meeting safety and quality requirements. To study the characteristics of modular and offsite construction, questionnaires have been conducted during the last decade by many organizations, including the Modular Building Institute (MBI), the Buildoffsite campaigning organization in the United Kingdom, the Canadian Manufactured Housing Institute, the National Institute of Building Sciences, McGraw-Hill Construction, and the Fails Management Institute. This paper introduces comprehensive analysis of the results of a questionnaire survey carried out in collaboration between members of the Department of Building, Civil & Environmental Engineering at Concordia University, the Modular Building Institute, NRB Inc., and the Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering at the University of Alberta. The questionnaire focuses on two issues: (1) the characteristics of the modular and offsite construction industry, and (2) the barriers against increased market share in this industry. For the latter, an effort was made to address a set of five factors identified in a workshop on the topic of challenges and opportunities for modular construction in Canada held in Montréal in 2015 to analyze barriers to growth of modular construction in the Canadian context. Key findings of this survey include requests for use of a separate building code for modular construction design, innovative financing and insurance solutions, standards that consider procurement regulations, and for financial institutions to create lending programs suited for modular construction.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.006 | 0.012 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".