Prefabricated Buildings for Smart Cities: A Literature Survey

Prefabricated buildings are becoming a focal point in smart city development indebted to their many advantages. To assess the current research status of prefabricated buildings and understand their suitability for smart cities, this paper surveyed papers from the Web of Science and conducted bibliometric analysis to identify the main research themes of prefabricated buildings. Then, a comprehensive review of smart city-oriented prefabricated buildings is undertaken from the perspective of each phase of their life cycle. The result indicates that underlying data collection, modeling or analysis methods such as the Internet of Things (IoT), digital twin, machine learning, and artificial intelligence (AI) are the main interests in recent literature. On the other hand, the current research on prefabricated buildings is recently shifting toward a higher degree of intelligence and digitalization. Facilitated by information and communication technology (ICT) and big data techniques, prefabricated buildings make integration into smart cities more feasible. Additionally, this paper highlights the shortcomings in the current research on prefabricated buildings and suggests directions for future work.