Exploring Critical Success Factors for Fully Prefabricated Assembly Technology Adopted by Urban Tunnels

The application of fully prefabricated assembly technology in urban tunnel construction can effectively alleviate a series of negative problems caused by traditional cast-in-place construction techniques, such as traffic congestion and environmental pollution. Despite this, their prefabricated rate is relatively low and is yet to be improved. A potentially important reason is the lack of the comprehensive evaluation mechanism to determine the factors which can promote the development of fully prefabricated assembly technology in the urban tunnel projects. As a prelude to the development of such a mechanism, this paper aims to explore the critical factors for the successful application of full prefabricated assembly technology in urban tunnel construction. A thorough and comprehensive collection of various factors that can affect the success of constructing full prefabricated assembly urban tunnels were identified from a multi-stakeholder perspective. Through face-to-face and online questionnaire survey geared towards urban tunnel projects participants with fully prefabricated assembly technology experience, the opinions of various parties were sought and evaluated in relation to the selected success factors. The data are then analyzed with various statistical techniques in terms of mean score ranking, factor analysis, sensitivity analysis and other methods. The results uncover eight sets of critical factors: technology, building side, external environment, construction unit, scientific research team, factors of other participants, influencing factors of project construction, policies and laws. The first four common factors are more sensitive to full prefabricated assembly urban tunnels. The research findings are expected to promote the development of fully prefabricated assembly urban tunnel projects.