As the nation is awaiting for the economical impacts of pandemic todissipate, infrastructure is expected to be a key area of support to rejuvenate the national construction industry. Two national mega infrastructure projects, Mass Rapid Transit Circle Line (MRT 3) and Pan Borneo Highwayare designed in great reliance of Industrialised Building System (IBS) method.

Newsflow on MRT 3 progress regains its momentum since late last year, prospecting that the initial phase of the mega infrastructure project will soon commence. This was further supplemented by the statement made by MRT Corp's Chief Executive Officer, Datuk Mohd Zarih Hashim on the project structure likely to be finalised in the first quarter of this year.

Amidst the news buzz, the project is expected to adopt several IBS precast components in its construction, namely the Segmental Box Girders (SBG) and Tunnel Lining Segment (TLS) among others. The IBS adoption would see the project to bear even more competitive costing incomparison to the previous MRT 2 project. Emphasis was given by the project coordinator on the manufacturing construction like IBS and Building Information Modelling (BIM) in selecting the developers for the MRT 3 project.

Such adoption of IBS as well as BIM in the project would also see significance reduction of the reliance on foreign workers to 30%, as was 48% in the previous MRT 2 project. With the inclusion of the construction technologies, the MRT 3 project is expected to be at lower costs even with longer route compared to its predecessor projects. Another national mega infrastructure project, Pan Borneo Highway which commenced its construction in October 2015 are also developed with integration of IBS,and is witnessing considerable overall costs optimization throughout the progress.

To learn more on IBS and its components, visit CIDB IBS portal here. Alternatively, our IBS Centre is open for public visit in Cheras, Kuala Lumpur.