Cloud manufacturing, internet of things-assisted manufacturing and 3D printing technology: Reliable tools for sustainable construction

Abstract

The United Nations (UN) 2030 agenda on sustainable development goals (SDGs) en-courages us to implement sustainable infrastructure and services for confronting challenges such as large energy consumption, solid waste generation, depletion of water resources and emission of greenhouse gases in the construction industry. Therefore, to overcome challenges and estab-lishing sustainable construction, there is a requirement to integrate information technology with innovative manufacturing processes and materials science. Moreover, the wide implementation of three-dimensional printing (3DP) technology in constructing monuments, artistic objects, and residential buildings has gained attention. The integration of the Internet of Things (IoT), cloud manufacturing (CM), and 3DP allows us to digitalize the construction for providing reliable and digitalized features to the users. In this review article, we discuss the opportunities and challenges of implementing the IoT, CM, and 3D printing (3DP) technologies in building constructions for achieving sustainability. The recent convergence research of cloud development and 3D printing (3DP) are being explored in the article by categorizing them into multiple sections including 3D printing resource access technology, 3D printing cloud platform (3D–PCP) service architectures, 3D printing service optimized configuration technology, 3D printing service evaluation technology, and 3D service control and monitoring technology. This paper also examines and analyzes the limitations of existing research and, moreover, the article provides key recommendations such as automation with robotics, predictive analytics in 3DP, eco-friendly 3DP, and 5G technology-based IoT-based CM for future enhancements. © 2021 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.