It’s the services engineer’s responsibility to coordinate the disciplines and disseminate information to all the relevant parties to ensure their services can be properly provided..
At Bryden Wood, our Creative Technologies team has found that in the process of developing configurators, simply putting the rigour behind what is or isn’t a rule, or what is or isn’t acceptable, is very helpful.Miranda Sharp says that she’s experienced exactly the same types of issues in the infrastructure space.
She recalls a conversation with two linear infrastructure providers who wanted to establish a simple use case of information to be shared in order to better guard against, and mitigate, the effects of flood.However, with one provider interested in road safety and surface water, and the other in railways and embankment flooding, they quickly discovered that their differing concerns added significant complication to the task.A complex process of questioning ensued around the use and translation of nomenclature, which Sharp says was a useful process in itself.
However, the fact remained that every time they opened a new conversation, a new dimension and further complexity was revealed.. Sharp says this is why the ideas behind the National Digital Twin are necessary, because although we have lots of very specialised and efficient systems for sharing information, in order to achieve the next level of efficiency and public benefit, we need to start sharing information between systems.While we’re very optimised to keep water off the roads, we don’t really understand other aspects, such as whether a drainage ditch should be built to go left or right at a particular junction.
The information exists, we just need to find different ways of interpreting between it.. Sharp says that digitising planning is very much a use case of the National Digital Twin programme because people can see the value in it and therefore have the appetite to address it.
She highlights that we’re currently at the very early stages of connecting digital twins and we need to choose projects which will move us forward, picking the low hanging fruit.Applying the core tenets of Design to Value, a modelling strategy can be developed which connects the project brief and client aims to the performance of the final product, measuring options against appropriate KPIs to improve performance and reduce risk..
Practical applications to drive efficiency with DES and DfMA.Recently, we have applied Discrete Event Simulation (DES) in a project for the rapid DfMA construction of storage and distribution facilities, building flexible, digital models that can represent both the on-site assembly sequences and the supply chain operations for the construction of multiple sites in Europe.
In doing so we can validate and optimise the construction programme whilst also gaining insights into frequency and pattern of deliveries.This data can then be used to optimise stock quantities and locations, as well as discover any potential bottlenecks and options for alleviating these, to support the most efficient build sequence.. Bryden Wood has successfully applied these techniques to Platform construction (P-DfMA) and continues to do so for large clients.