Van Wijnen Components

Several years ago, Van Wijnen Components formulated the ambition to realize fully automated housing production. If this is possible for a car, why wouldn’t this be possible for a house? Well, good question. Vlieg Engineering has been closely involved in this development from the start and has automated various processes.

An example of this was the (floor) reinforcement/rebar algorithm. This algorithm was able to calculate the complete (floor) reinforcement of a residential housing block in milliseconds. Such a housing block quickly consisted of more than 30 floors that were calculated individually. This geometric information could then be translated into production files that the robots used to produce the floors. It is a vivid example of CTO (configure to order) compared to ETO (engineering to order).

Above is an image of one such floor where the reinforcement has been calculated by this algorithm. It is noticeable that the reinforcement has no intersections with the objects in the floor and that it contains extra bars in certain places. These are all decisions that the algorithm has consciously made. As a result, the generated floors meet the requirements of the constructor and the machine restrictions of the factory.