Editorial for Special Issue on Digital Concrete (2018-08)¶

This special issue of Cement and Concrete Research is dedicated to the keynote and invited papers of the RILEM 1^st International Conference on Concrete and Digital Fabrication, also referred to as Digital Concrete 2018 [1]. This conference is sponsored by RILEM as an activity of the Technical Committee on Digital Fabrication with Concrete. It has also received very large industrial support, reflecting the interest of the building sector for this subject. Digital fabrication has emerged as the 3^rd industrial revolution, with perspectives of delivering low cost individualized solutions and products, something often referred to as mass-customization. Developments in this field encompass numerous manufacturing methods and materials, with concrete being no exception. An indication of the interest in digital concrete lies in increased number of scientific publications and patent applications on the subject. Additionally, the field has seen a growing number of workshops and seminars on the subject. In this respect, Digital Concrete 2018 is the first major multi-day event dealing with concrete and digital fabrication. It is hosted by the Swiss National Centre for Competence in Research on Digital Fabrication in Architecture [2] at ETH Zurich, conjunctly with ROB|ARCH 2018, the leading conference for robotics in architecture [3]. In doing so, the organizers aim at facilitating exchange among disciplines since interdisciplinarity is absolutely crucial to digital fabrication. This is reflected by our choice of keynotes and invited talks for Digital Concrete 2018. In particular, the papers presented in this issue of Cement and Concrete Research cover aspects of. Vision: What can we expect from concrete and digital fabrication?. Manufacturing: What processes and what challenges?. Materials: What chemistry for what properties?. Mechanics: How to design and reinforce digital concrete?. In what follows, we present a brief overview on these different subject areas, highlighting key features of the related papers.