Designing out waste is highly desirable for managing waste effectively [7,21]. This emerging concept is offering numerous opportunities of preventing construction waste. However, designers are still long way off actually practicing it during their design activities [1,13]. Specifically, the lack of awareness of potential of waste management at design stage, extra time and effort needed to achieve it, and lack of design-based tools for designing out waste, are few of such barriers to achieve it. This reveals a clear opportunity to demonstrate its applicability by developing computer-assisted automated tools that involve designers to mitigate construction waste at early stages of the design. Designing out waste, however, is non-trivial in the sense it presents myriad intricate challenges that must be resolved for it to deliver to its promise [10,11,22]. Even answering preliminary questions about the detailed design activities that cause construction waste is hard [11,12,52]. To this end, Waste and Resource Action Plan (WRAP) has provided a basic roadmap for researchers by identifying five design principles [23], namely, design for re-use and recovery, design (i) (ii) for resource optimisation, design for off-site construction, design for resource efficient (iii) (iv) procurement, and design for the future. There exists numerous opportunities in each of the (v) abovementioned design principles that guarantee to change this prevailing mantra. This study mainly explores the opportunities laid out by resource optimisation and waste efficient procurement. Some of these potential opportunities are: design layout optimisation, (i) materials selection and optimisation, standardisation and dimensional coordination (ii) (iii) (masonry, rebar, tiling, carpets, timber, doors, and windows) building level & position (iv) optimisation, wall lining optimisation, materials packaging optimisation, (vi) (vii) (viii) procurement route optimisation, and supplier selection. Mostly, these opportunities require (ix) computationally intensive optimisation techniques, which are carried out in real time to facilitate designers on best-fit design decisions to minimise construction waste [10,52]. Nevertheless, if this is achieved (easier said than done), it would be a major breakthrough in the industry and would increase productivity of different stakeholders in unprecedented ways.
Designing out waste is highly desirable for managing waste effectively [7,21]. This emerging concept is offering numerous opportunities of preventing construction waste. However, designers are still long way off actually practicing it during their design activities [1,13]. Specifically, the lack of awareness of potential of waste management at design stage, extra time and effort needed to achieve it, and lack of design-based tools for designing out waste, are few of such barriers to achieve it. This reveals a clear opportunity to demonstrate its applicability by developing computer-assisted automated tools that involve designers to mitigate construction waste at early stages of the design. Designing out waste, however, is non-trivial in the sense it presents myriad intricate challenges that must be resolved for it to deliver to its promise [10,11,22]. Even answering preliminary questions about the detailed design activities that cause construction waste is hard [11,12,52]. To this end, Waste and Resource Action Plan (WRAP) has provided a basic roadmap for researchers by identifying five design principles [23], namely, (i) design for re-use and recovery, (ii) design for resource optimisation, (iii) design for off-site construction, (iv) design for resource efficient procurement, and (v) design for the future. There exists numerous opportunities in each of the abovementioned design principles that guarantee to change this prevailing mantra. This study mainly explores the opportunities laid out by resource optimisation and waste efficient procurement. Some of these potential opportunities are: (i) design layout optimisation, (ii) materials selection and optimisation, (iii) standardisation and dimensional coordination (masonry, rebar, tiling, carpets, timber, doors, and windows) (iv) building level & position optimisation, (vi) wall lining optimisation, (vii) materials packaging optimisation, (viii) procurement route optimisation, (ix) and supplier selection. Mostly, these opportunities require computationally intensive optimisation techniques, which are carried out in real time to facilitate designers on best-fit design decisions to minimise construction waste [10,52]. Nevertheless, if this is achieved (easier said than done), it would be a major breakthrough in the industry and would increase productivity of different stakeholders in unprecedented ways.