BIM-Enabled Quality Control Framework for Off-Site Construction (OSC)

Abstract

Off-Site Construction (OSC) relies on the factory-based production of building components, where effective quality control is essential to prevent defects from propagating into transportation, installation, and on-site assembly stages. Within this context, Inspection data generated through Non-Destructive Testing (NDT), constitutes a key input to quality control, providing systematic inspection techniques that enable the evaluation of material integrity, fabrication quality, and assembly accuracy without damaging or altering prefabricated components. NDT is particularly suited to OSC environments as inspections must be performed on high-value elements under tight production schedules, where destructive testing is impractical and economically prohibitive. NDT offers practical tools for identifying defects and construction-related discontinuities in prefabricated elements; however, inspection outcomes are often disconnected from Building Information Modelling (BIM) workflows used for design coordination and construction planning. This disconnect limits the use of inspection data for construction decision-making and lifecycle quality management. This paper presents a construction-oriented framework for integrating NDT inspection results into BIM-based workflows for OSC projects. The proposed approach aligns factory-level inspections with BIM models to support defect traceability, quality documentation, and coordination across design and manufacturing phases. NDT methods applicable to prefabricated construction components are mapped to BIM elements, enabling visualization of inspection results and systematic tracking of quality issues throughout the project lifecycle. An application scenario based on a prefabricated steel welded joint system is used to illustrate the implementation of the framework. Inspection methods are applied to detect and characterize weld defects such as lack of fusion (LOF), lack of penetration (LOP), porosity, and cracking in weld joints. The inspection data are processed and mapped to BIM components using a structured workflow. The application scenario demonstrates how NDT inspection data can be integrated into BIM workflow to support defect visualization, traceability, and quality control in steel structures used in off-site construction. The study highlights the role of BIM-enabled inspection integration as a practical pathway toward more reliable, efficient, and data-driven quality control processes in off-site construction.