Off-Site Construction: Challenges and Prospects for Supporting the Energy Transition
A special issue of Sustainability (ISSN 2071-1050). This special issue belongs to the section "Green Building".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (31 May 2025) | Viewed by 1285
Special Issue Editors
Interests: green buildings; building renovation; building simulations; innovative dry-layer technology; off-site construction techniques; building envelope performance monitoring; indoor comfort analysis; outdoor comfort analysis and simulation; heatwave mitigation measure design
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Interests: industrial sustainability; circular economy; digitalization; decarbonization
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Interests: energy efficiency of industrial products and processes; development of decision support tools and optimization tool for low-temperature heat recovery in the industrial sector; study of innovative thermal and non-thermal heat treatments as a replacement for or complement to traditional thermal technologies in the food sector; optimization of off-site construction value chains
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
Buildings are responsible for a large share of energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions. Energy efficiency projects in the form of building retrofits can improve the energy performance of buildings and contribute to net-zero transition. As such, they are largely supported by current legislation such as the European Energy Performance of Buildings Directive. Off-site construction (OSC) is an interesting method for both retrofit and new construction projects, with several advantages over traditional construction methods. It involves the manufacture and pre-assembly of building components, elements, or modules prior to their installation in their final locations, ensuring significant quality as well as a reduction in time, costs, and environmental and social impact. Despite the benefits of OSC, its application is not globally uniform, and several challenges to its use can be identified, making a holistic understanding of this topic much needed. This Special Issue aims to provide a comprehensive and advanced overview of OSC, welcoming all research types (literature reviews and qualitative and quantitative research) from different geographical contexts. This Special Issue will include, but is not limited to, the following topics:
- Barriers to and drivers of OSC;
- OSC benefits;
- OSC materials, including innovative and unconventional materials;
- OSC solutions (components and elements);
- Production process of OSC components and elements;
- OSC value chain;
- Digital OSC technologies;
- Sustainability and OSC;
- Circular economy and OSC;
- Net-zero transition and OSC.
Dr. Graziano Salvalai
Dr. Alessandra Neri
Dr. Miriam Benedetti
Guest Editors
Manuscript Submission Information
Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.
Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Sustainability is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.
Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.
Keywords
- off-site construction
- modular buildings
- construction industrialization
- value chain sustainability
- construction circular economy
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