Category:Construction

From EuroVR Knowledge Base

Brief overview of area

A vast number of 3D simulators have been developed within recent years to facilitate the constructions industrial area. Such a conceptual sector (i.e., architectural, civil Engineers tasks) can profit from enhanced 3D representations achieving shorter time-to-realize times. Up to now, relevant actors have limited themselves in using desktop tools, while interoperability among different CAD tools has always been a problem, concerning the size of DMU models.

• Large scale application handling in relation to CAD size;
• Advanced simulation interaction options (i.e., structural design checking);
• Interoperability among CAD and VR/VEs.

Construction Industry

In the past decade, construction companies have spent a great deal of effort and resources in improving their business processes. New forms of innovative project management, supported by recent IT developments, have appeared in response to ever-growing pressure from owners to complete projects on time and deliver high quality buildings.

Construction has become an information intensive industry and information management has become a discipline in its own right in this industry. Despite the interest and effort applied by leading companies, information management in the construction industry is still in its infancy. Many efforts are underway to work towards developing a virtual information model for construction projects which can capture information related to each product life cycle stages of a construction project.

Construction projects involve a large number of direct stakeholders (clients, professional teams, contractors) and indirect stakeholders (local authorities, residents, workers).

There are significant barriers to communications between the stakeholders, as shown in Figure 1. Many researchers have acknowledged the limitations of current approaches to the management of information in projects. Most of these limitations are due to:

• Much project information is stored on paper as drawings and written documents. This is frequently unstructured and difficult to use. It is also easy to lose or damage (Construct IT 2000).
  
• Thousands of documents are shared during a typical project, leading to significant human errors in managing the versioning of these documents.
  
• This process leads to incomplete understanding of the planned construction, functional inefficiencies, inaccurate initial work or clashes between components.
  
• People responsible for collecting and archiving project data may not always understand the specific needs of those who will use it, such as those involved in buildings maintenance.
  
• The data is usually not managed while it is created, but instead it is captured and archived at the end of the construction stage. This means that people who have knowledge about the project are often likely to have left for another project by this time – so their input is not captured.
  
• Lessons learned are not organised well and are buried in details. It is therefore difficult to compile and disseminate useful knowledge and best practice to other projects.
  

As a result, the building construction industry is now thriving to explore a centralised model where all the product data can be captured in a standard format. One of the key requirements for the construction industry is to have an integrated software platform, based on a standard information model, which can integrate people, processes and tools. Such a platform will enable the industry to transform its current practices to achieve better communication between partners and to adopt concurrent engineering practices common in other sectors such as aerospace and automotive. The benefit of such an integrated approach is as follows:

• Much of the project information can be presented in a visual format rather than as text. This will facilitate communication and information sharing between stakeholders using both mobile and fixed work environments.
  
• Many aspects of the proposed building can be computer simulated to improve client briefing and design reviews.
  
• Interactive technologies can be used to consider life cycle issues such as environmental impact, space planning, facilities management, emergency evacuation, security and constructability, involving clients, planners, architects, designers, civil engineers, contractors, facility managers and security personnel.
  
• E-learning environment, based on real projects, can be used to create a high skill workforce in Europe.

Given these market demands, there is a need to extend and integrate virtual reality technology within building information models so that all the stakeholders involved in a construction project can work as a virtual team to design, build and maintain buildings. Furthermore, using virtual technologies team should be able to simulate various aspects of a building such as acoustic properties, thermal comfort, structural integrity, emergency evacuation, safety issues, constructability, and maintainability aspects of buildings.

Urban Planning

With some 70% of Europe’s population living in urban areas it becomes increasing important to deliver environments in which people want to live and work and which contribute to their sense of well-being. The situation is not unlike that in other parts of the globe that are entering the post-industrial era. The most significant barrier to more sustainable urban re/development of cities is the lack of consensus between citizens, politicians and business over actions and targets. Current patterns of consumption and production plus business and political decision-making paradigms are locked into current models of demand for goods and services because citizens do not have ownership, nor a common vision, of change towards more sustainable communities and life-styles.

An approach to the feeling of exclusion is to recognise that participation in the planning process is educational in itself and to consciously enhance the process to promote learning. It can be argued that the problems facing the planning process relate to a complex of communication and learning process. In order for greater participation within the planning process, there must be an effective communication system to complement changes in attitude through knowledge flow. For participation to lead to better democratic decision making, however, knowledge flow and learning must take place, where learning is defined as the synthesis and analysis of information obtained through communication. Decision-makers need to learn and understand the views and needs of stakeholders, and all participants need to learn about the likely long term consequences of their decisions. The virtual workspaces can create environments which will enhance such communication, learning, consensus building, democratic processes and participatory planning.

Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) have the potential to foster much greater collaborative working and integration between stakeholders, the so called ‘e’ based knowledge society. This democratisation of the urban development process is seen to offer enormous potential in terms of seeking much more sustainable way of life. Visions of the intelligent city see the potential for ICTs in helping to solve many of the current problems in cities, both in terms of the design and redevelopment process and in terms of their operation and use. There are exciting opportunities for new ways of planning and governing urban development and regeneration, where complex problems are handled more effectively by integrating the decision-making across a number of professional actors and citizens. Here better information about development proposals can be provided in a timely and accessible manner, enabling effective participation and empowerment of stakeholders. Advanced ICT could be used to modernise the current spatial planning process by facilitating e-participation, evident-based design and democratic decision making processes involving citizens and stakeholders at all levels.

The technologies necessary for creating the proposed virtual workspaces have reached maturity, now requiring systemic innovation and integration to create the necessary collaborative workspaces for participatory planning. For example, technologies such as GIS, VR, distributed software frameworks, simulation software are well developed and exist as commercial products or research outputs. Therefore there is a need to bring these relevant technologies together to build a user-centred urban planning workspaces to support tighter collaboration between stakeholders while promoting democratic processes to include citizens' views. The benefits of creating such a virtual environmental planning environment are:

• Availability of such a visual and interactive environment can be used to build consensus between professional stakeholders.
  
• Variant of this environment can be used to engage public and promote democratic processes.
• Foresight studies can be conducted to predict the consequences of various design options and choose the option which can lead to getter quality of life of citizens.
  
• Same environment can be used to provide context information to citizens and city management services.

Research Projects

Research projects include:

Vision and potential scenarios of use

Distributed Design Work Environment

Purpose: To illustrate the use of virtual technologies during the design phase of a product to improve flexible collaboration between teams.

Actors: Tom – Self employed FEA consultant; Giovanna - design manager for a bridge

Script:

• Giovanna and her team of five designers, who are collocated at the industrial park’s recently opened collaboration centre, are preparing for a milestone meeting with their main customer.
• Instead of flying the entire team down, the milestone meeting is organised as a distributed session, by connecting the co-workspace installation at the collaboration centre and the matching facilities at the customer’s headquarters in China with large, interactive display for visualisation and virtual tools for collaboration.
• During the preparations, one of the test engineers suddenly notices a mismatch between the results of two tests used to discover complex load conditions. The collaboration centre has been developed to support both planned and on-demand interaction between collaboration centre participants and others, and is thus well equipped to support situations like this. By facilitating contributions from external experts participating using a mobile setup or similar advanced meeting facilities / collaboration centres, the team can quickly connect to various resources to solve the problem.
• After briefly discussing the possible consequences, they decide to check if it is possible to run a new set of simulations to determine if it is necessary to change the design or not. While her five designers are busy preparing the presentation and different physical and digital models they are going to show and discuss with their customer in some four hours time, Giovanna enters the “External Team Resources” section of their digital project workspace by interacting directly with a large, interactive display. The optical tracking set-up installed around the display allowed her to use her fingers to directly interact with the virtual screen. She notices that Tom’s status is “personal device / online”, and calls him by using her finger to press his virtual picture on the display.
• “Hello, Giovanna”, Tom says. She greets him back and asks if he has a couple of minutes. He responds positively, and Giovanna explains him the situation, and asks him if it is possible to quickly check if the new load conditions will require any design changes to prevent failure. “I’ll see what I can do”, Tom says, and leaves the session. Giovanna returns to her other tasks, comforted by knowing that Tom was taking care of business. She had met Tom 3 years earlier through LinkedIn, and had nothing but good things to say about him. He was just one of those super-competent guys that you could always rely on.
• Twenty five minutes later, it therefore came as no surprise when the communication system announced “Incoming call from Tom, asking for video mode with shared viewing of simulation results, please respond with preferred communication mode”. Giovanna responds “accept, engage in full collaboration”.
• The system adapts to her request and optimises cameras and displays to support shared interaction with complex graphics. Tom appears in full size on the main communication screen, and he smiles, wearing his see-through 3D stereo glasses. Giovanna thinks they look kind of cool. The assuring look in his face is a great relief, and they already know the answer. Tom says “Hello folks, I have good news for you. As you can see on the shared display, the new load conditions do not require a redesign. Under normal operating conditions, the design should still exceed the design requirement of trouble-free operation for the specified period by the client. You have the output files in the shared space; do you need anything else before your meeting today?” Giovanna and the others all thank him for helping them out, wish him a great, well-earned weekend, and close the video session to continue preparing for their meeting.
• Giovanna looks at her watch. Three and a half hours to go. They might even have time for lunch and a coffee before the meeting, she thinks. That’s just brilliant.