A consortium of partners including Mace, 3D Repo, Imperial College, University College London, eviFile and Mission Room have won £1.6m of funding in the form of a grant from Innovate UK, the UK’s innovation agency. It will be used to produce a construction management and reporting platform with a total project cost of £3.6m.
It follows on from previous Innovate UK-funded projects of 3D Repo, namely AEC Delta Mobility led by BuroHappold, VISUALISE led by Skanska, and i3P-funded SafetiBase.
Led by Mace, the project partners have joined forces to improve productivity, quality, and performance of the UK construction sector, as part of the Transforming UK Construction demonstrator projects funding competition. The fund is also part of a larger initiative by the UK government with a £4.7bn increase in research and development over the next four years.
The team will create a solution to help UK construction be more efficient and proactive rather than reactive, with a scalable and repeatable ‘plug-and-play’ construction management and reporting platform known as the AEC Production Control Room.
Dr Jozef Dobos, founder and CEO of 3D Repo, said: “Construction projects are infamous for delays, omissions, overruns and often spiralling costs. The AEC Production Control Room will allow clients, planners, site managers, and engineers to be able to track real-time project performance and take action based on insights. These stakeholders will, for the first time, be able to objectively compare what was planned versus what has been delivered.”
At a physical location within the site office, touch-enabled projectors and multiple immersive displays will present comparable project metrics such as EIR and RFI coordination, health and safety data, evidence-based task management, business intelligence, and 4D planning.
Critical project data will be made available to key stakeholders who can make better-informed decisions within the construction process early on.
Matt Gough, director of innovation at Mace, said: “The AEC Production Control Room aims to improve the performance of construction through increased transparency and project benchmarking. We’ve taken a digital approach to design, construction, and management to create a solution that is both repeatable and scalable and will deliver a single focal point for any project, with data accessible anytime over the internet.”
The AEC Production Control Room delivers a standardised approach to business intelligence and project metrics visualisation.
