Symposium 2025: Construction

Building for 2030

The Urgency of Higher Efficiency in Construction

The construction industry is facing a massive transformation. With the Zero Emission Building (ZEB) legislation taking effect in 2030, the pressure to renovate and build at scale has never been greater. Yet, the sector simultaneously grapples with a severe shortage of skilled workers and a lack of automation to keep construction affordable.
To meet these opposing forces, the industry must move towards a drastic productivity increase by rethinking how buildings are designed, assembled, and maintained. The construction site of the future will be a hybrid environment where humans and intelligent systems work hand in hand to deliver more, faster, better and at lower cost.

Automation and Robotisation

From the Factory Floor to the Construction Site

To cope with the shortage of skilled labour and increasing demands, automation and robotisation are key enablers of productivity. Demonstrators like the Smart Electromagnetic Gripper for Flexible Metal Sheet Handling, Robot-Aided Scaffold Assembly highlight how robots can safely and efficiently manipulate complex components, reducing manual effort and increasing precision. These innovations mark the transition from tedious manual, repetitive tasks to collaborative and autonomous systems that can take over physically demanding or hazardous operations on site.

The demonstrator Robotic Inspection of Highly Reflective Painted Surfaces using Deflectometry is a tangible example of how automation can replace slow and inconsistent manual inspection tasks. By using novel techniques, such as CAD-based robot path planning and AI-based defect detection, component manufacturers and off-site construction companies can assure their products consistently meet high-quality standards, while reducing the burden on personnel.

Quality control with cameras works well for inspecting the exterior of parts or buildings. However, it can often provide little information about the quality on the inside. For components that have to guarantee the stability and strength of a building, it is important that this quality is good. Current ways of checking internal quality are often slow, expensive or inaccurate. Flanders Make has developed a solution to quickly and reliably detect internal defects, such as cracks, cavities or creep: Resonant testing for product control.

Digitalisation and Smart Decision-Making

From Chaos to Control

Construction projects are notoriously complex, involving multiple subcontractors, suppliers, and external influences such as weather conditions or logistics delays. In such an environment, real-time planning and forecasting become essential.

The Digital Twin for End-to-End Demand Forecasting in Complex Supply Chains provides an intelligent decision-support system that can simulate and anticipate disruptions across the supply chain. By recognising potential ripple effects, it enables project managers to adjust plans proactively, thus improving resilience, reducing downtime, and keeping projects on track even under extreme variability.

Closely linked to this, the Planning and Scheduling booth shows how planning can be optimized by means of digitalising the end-to-end process. Off-site production companies who model their production lines can pro-actively identify and resolve bottlenecks. Integrating supply chain insights into daily operations will lead to more accurate scheduling. This reduces inventory buffers and allows materials and prefab components to be delivered just in time for installation on the construction site.

By accounting for the dependencies between different actors in the supply chain and switching flexibly to alternative solutions when disruptions occur, construction companies can plan their activities more precisely. Optimal alternative solution paths can be determined using simulations based on historical data. On-site, this means less idle time and faster project completion.

Digital twins and advanced planning tools will not only revolutionise project coordination, but also energy management, for instance, by monitoring energy usage, optimising their flows and recognising upcoming faults early. This will help our buildings and construction processes to be more efficient and less error prone. The demo Energy Management System (EMS) for Hybrid Energy Storage Systems (HESS) explores this concept, showing how to carefully balance energy flows.

Empowering People

Training, Wellbeing, and Expertise Retention

While automation transforms processes, people remain at the heart of construction. With fewer skilled workers entering the field, training, upskilling, and wellbeing become strategic priorities.
The demonstrators Measuring Cognitive Load in Assembly through Immersive Eye Tracking in VR and Competence-Aware Training and Instruction Generation showcase how digital tools can support construction workers in real time, providing personalised guidance, monitoring workload, and preventing burnout or absenteeism.

By understanding each worker’s cognitive and physical capacity, construction companies can create tailored instructions and micro-learnings that enhance both performance and safety. Combined with expert knowledge systems, this ensures that invaluable experience is captured, shared, and reused across teams, turning the industry’s “war for talent” into an opportunity for smarter collaboration between humans and technology.

Towards a New Era of Highly Productive Construction

As the sector races toward 2030, the construction industry is reinventing itself—becoming faster, safer, and smarter. From intelligent robots assembling scaffolds to digital twins forecasting material flows, from immersive VR-based training to energy-optimised prefab systems, each innovation contributes to the industrialised construction ecosystem of the future.

By integrating automation, digitalisation, and human-centric design, we are not only building more efficiently but also shaping the sustainable construction landscape that Europe’s climate goals demand.