According to some housing affordability advocates, the solution to soaring construction costs will involve buildings pieced together from preassembled room-sized modules that are winched into place and then fitted together like building blocks.

But Ottawa home builder Frank Cairo, co-founder and CEO of the Caivan Group, has another analogy that he’s looking to bring to fruition in a new 100,000-square-foot assembly plant the firm has built outside the city: “What we’re manufacturing,” he says, “is actually set up to be installed in a way that you’d install an IKEA cabinet: simple layouts, things are well labelled and when they arrive on-site, you don’t need to have a whole bunch of experience.”

The recently opened plant, a Caivan subsidiary called Advanced Building Innovation Company (ABIC), uses about two dozen types of software, including artificial intelligence systems, as well as robotics, process optimization tools and just-in-time inventory controls to produce the components for four to six customized homes each day.

“We are harnessing algorithms and generative design technology to allow for adaptive manufacturing systems that are dynamic,” he says, explaining that the company’s software platform translates two-dimensional floor plans into site-specific three-dimensional designs, the components of which are then precision manufactured and then shipped to the job site.

The cloud-based software automatically triggers orders of raw materials, schedules trades and minimizes waste. The time savings between conventional construction and the firm’s factory-based assembly is about three months for a typical home, claims Mr. Cairo, who co-owns the business with partner Troy van Haastrecht. “That three months saving isn’t just because of what happens in the factory. It’s this wholesale approach to an autonomous ecosystem that allows that savings to occur.”

Caivan is one of a growing number of home builders that have set out to do something audacious in an industry – construction – that is notorious for its stagnant productivity levels, which have helped fuel rising housing prices.

Read the full article, Bringing home building inside, published by the Globe and Mail.