Tracing the evolution of prefabricated construction technology from structural systems to digital integration using patent data

Prefabricated construction has become a key pathway for industrial upgrading, yet existing studies often rely on static or descriptive approaches that fail to capture its dynamic technological trajectories. Recent advances in digital technologies, including BIM, IoT, and data-driven systems, have increasingly influenced the broader technological landscape of the construction industry. Against this backdrop, this study constructs a data-driven framework based on large-scale patent mining, dynamic topic modeling, and evolutionary visualization analysis to systematically track the development trajectory of prefabricated construction technology. Based on a corpus of 30,186 patents collected from the incoPat database (2014–2024), dynamic topic modeling was applied to identify 20 technological topics, with keywords filtered through TF-IDF and mutual information, and validated by expert evaluation. Topic strength was quantified based on the average posterior topic probability within each time slice. The analysis reveals a progressive transition from the prefabrication of individual components to system-level functional integration, accompanied by increasing attention to sustainability, energy-related applications, and construction-supporting systems for complex engineering scenarios. Distinct evolutionary paths exhibit significant differences in flow intensity, semantic attributes, and structural positions, reflecting the joint influence of policy guidance, industrial collaboration, material and process innovations, and system-level technological coordination. Overall, prefabricated construction technology is gradually evolving from component-oriented innovations toward more integrated technological systems. The identified evolution patterns highlight the growing importance of system coordination, sustainability-oriented solutions, and cross-domain technological integration within the broader prefabricated construction ecosystem.