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This article addresses the lack of formal design guidance that supports flexibility within the architectural and engineered systems of manufacturing facilities through the development of a taxonomy and associated terminology.

This research performed a comparative analysis of 15 manufacturing facilities located both within the United States (73 percent of cases) and internationally (27 percent of cases). These case studies provided details on how and where flexibility was incorporated into the design of a manufacturing facility. Specific consideration was given to the primary design features that enabled a decoupling of the facility from the manufacturing process. These design features were then clustered to identify main design strategies that enable flexibility.

By grouping the design features together and creating a common vocabulary, three coherent design approaches for flexible facilities were identified, each having a different potential for responding to short-term and long-term changes. These include general purpose, scalable, and dedicated facilities.

By delineating three high-level strategies for early flexible facility design, this research synthesizes a conceptual understanding of flexibility with practical and implementable designs. This synthesis provides an incremental advance to a complex challenge for researchers. It also provides decision support to design teams by aiding in project definition, when flexibility is desirable. This research is primarily limited by the number of cases reviewed. With more cases, additional facility design strategies may be identified.

The findings in this research allow for a basic understanding of how a flexible facility can be designed with only limited or vague information about the product and manufacturing processes contained within. The development of terminology associated with each facility design strategy provides standardization for the discussion and implementation of flexibility early in the design process. In doing so, flexible designs become easier to create and more efficient to implement.

This research provides the first synthesized approach for considering flexible facility design strategies within the manufacturing sector.

The purpose of this study was to examine how data from the World Health Organization, United States Environmental Protection Agency and Center for Disease Control have evolved with relation to engineering controls for heating, ventilation and air-conditioning (HVAC) systems to mitigate the spread of spread of aerosols (specifically related to the COVID-19 pandemic) in occupied buildings.

A document analysis of the pandemic-focused position documents from the aforementioned public health agencies and national HVAC authorities was performed. This review targeted a range of evidence from recommendations, best practices, codes and regulations and peer-reviewed publications and evaluated how they cumulatively evolved over time. Data was compared between 2020 and 2021.

This research found that core information provided early in the pandemic (i.e. early 2020) for engineering controls in building HVAC systems did not vary greatly as knowledge of the pandemic evolved (i.e. in June of 2021). This indicates that regulating agencies had a good, early understanding of how airborne viruses spread through building ventilation systems. The largest evolution in knowledge came from the broader acceptance of building ventilation as a transmission route and the increase in publications and ease of access to the information for the general public over time.

The promotion of the proposed controls for ventilation in buildings, as outlined in this paper, is another step toward reducing the spread of COVID-19 and future aerosol spread viruses by means of ventilation.