COMIT Construction Day

by Steve Slater, Chair for Construction

At the end of last month COMIT held a Construction Members workshop day which was kindly hosted by Bentley at their offices in London.

The aim of the day was to better understand the issues facing COMIT Construction members and to prioritise topic areas that can be put to the Technology members. 

The workshop was a great success and was thoroughly enjoyed by the 14 members that attended. Iain Miskimmin opened the session and welcomed everyone to the Bentley-Crossrail BIM academy. A number of presentations were given during the day to prompt debate:

• The State of Innovation in Construction - Steve Slater
• Trending in Construction - Stuart Young
• Setting Innovation Requirements - Iain Miskimmin

The workshop included the opportunity for each of the members to describe their own priority issues and a number of themes emerged with Collaboration and Communication generally being seen as the greatest challenges. 

Interoperability also continues to be a barrier to information transfer and more collection of data in the field at the point of work is needed to improve efficiency. Interestingly it seems there is still a lot to be done on the adoption of mobile forms, even though it is one of the earliest mobile technologies to be have been used in construction,

Unsurprisingly site connectivity came up, but specifically connectivity and hardware performance were seen to be limiting the use of BIM on site. We need to explore how we can improve this, perhaps by exploiting cloud technology.

In summary, the main issues raised and some of the comments are:

Collaboration

Both internal and external. Too much reliance on email, problems with silo'd information. Some alternatives suggested were Trello, Slack and Google drive. Gamification might help, as might restricting the number of systems available and the use of a common data environment.

Communication

Alternatives to email needed. Additional fields within Outlook may help to prioritise and manage emails. Restrict the use of attachments.

Rapid Site Set-up

It is still taking too long to get connectivity on site. 3 to 6 months plus for a BT line on site, which is not always fit for purpose. 3G/4G coverage improving but still insufficient. 

Safety / Issue reporting

Need requirement to report safety issues as soon as possible - and this can be by the public. Waze sat nav reporting was discussed as an example of where this works well.

Plant asset/incident reporting & recording

More use of in-vehicle camera's and suggestions for a a plant "blackbox".

BIM on site

Being constrained by limitations in current hardware and connectivity. Could cloud computing help to resolve this? Ability to view 4D model's with feedback required.

Forms - Electronic v Paper

Adoption still an issue. Mandating use may improve this and keeping the form as the original may help.

Dispatch / Deliver notes

Interesting developments but little progress. Speedy's E-POD implements this and scans the delivery vehicle registration number. Take-up not great.

Orders of Materials

Changes to the programme to reschedule deliveries of concrete e.t.c. would be good if possible.

Field / Site Plan updates

Real-time updates to the programme would improve the quality of planning information.

Internet of things

Interoperability was considered as key to exploiting this

Data Sharing

Fundamentally seen as poor but no suggestions for how it can be imporved

Environmental Monitoring

Of increasing importance. Capture of CO₂ from site plant and products used in construction was discussed.

Remote Asset Sensing

There is an ongoing and widespread need to improve the maintenance of assets.

As usual at COMIT events there was also a lot of informal discussion and networking, especially around the lunchtime refreshments. Many thanks again to Bentley our host and to my colleagues from COMIT for facilitating the event.

If you would like more information about this event or if you want to learn more about COMIT and what we do, then please visit us at comit.org.uk and email us via the contact page.

The COMIT Conference #comit2016

Regulars will know that COMIT holds a construction-focused mobile IT conference each autumn. Planning for this years' event is well under way and will be hosted by COMIT member CH2M at their London headquarters on the 28^th and 29^th September.

The theme is delivering value through innovation under the title of  Digitally Building Britain. The objective is to provide a forum for the presentation and discussion of innovations and solutions that deliver value to the construction industry - and of course for the delegates to share their views, network and learn about new and breakthrough technologies.

The two days will be broadly themed CAPEX and OPEX and tickets will be available for single days for those delegates who can only make one or the other - although we hope that most will join us for both days to benefit from the full TOTEX experience.

This will be COMIT's 8^th Annual Conference and we are going back to our roots to deliver a more intimate and networking-focused event. Delegate numbers will be strictly limited to 100 on each day, so early booking is advised (booking opens June 1^st ).

We are re-designing our usual conference schedule to create a slightly more relaxed pace, In previous years the only complaints that we've had from delegates is that there is just too much to take in. So this time around we are easing back a bit to allow more time for networking. 

There will still be a dozen quality presentations plus panel sessions over the two days but also more time to talk around the subjects and absorb the material. We are also planning a meal and networking event on the evening of the first day (28^th) where we hope delegates will join us to relax and discuss the issues of the day.

A call for presentations went out to COMIT members a couple of months ago, but is now open to everyone. We still have a few presentation slots to fill and are looking for high-quality submissions from organisations directly involved in providing or implementing innovative solutions in construction. We are looking for the latest research, innovations, achievements and technologies that can deliver value to our industry. The conference program is aimed at all levels of the construction supply chain, from Owners to Contractors, Consultants and Suppliers.

So if you have something you would like to share with an international COMIT audience then please visit our website and download instruction on how to apply. The closing date for submitting an abstract is the 30^th June.

Sponsorship & Exhibitor packages are currently being finalised and will be announced shortly. If you are interested in sponsoring the event or exhibiting at the conference and would like to get to the head of the queue then please contact us. Exhibition space will be more limited this year so an early response is advised.

Many thanks to those sponsors who have already been quick off the mark. In particular to CH2M for hosting the event, to @SuButcher and @EEpaul  and  for being our Social Media Sponsors and to @CITY_INSIGHTS for being our New Media sponsor.

We look forward to seeing you in September!

COMIT goes the extra mile for charity

Two members of the COMIT management team are running in this year's London Marathon which takes place on April 24th. Both are hoping to raise significant sums for charity. It would be great if you could support them. Good luck fellas!

Harrison O'Hara

I am taking on the biggest (longest) challenge of my life by running the London Marathon. I am raising money for St Christopher's hospice and your donations will make all the blisters, aching muscles and sore nipples worth it! St Christopher's provide a wide range of specialist end of life care throughout several London boroughs. The hospice has a vision of a world in which all dying people and those close to them have access to appropriate care and support, when they need it, wherever they need it and whoever they are. Your generous donations will go a long way to ensure they achieve their vision. Thank you for your support!

You can support Harrison by visiting his Just Giving page

Stuart Young

Having done a few seemingly crazy endurance events in the past including playing 7 rounds of golf in one day, I’m back for an even bigger and more enduring challenge. I am taking on a 26.2 miler after being lucky enough to get a place to run in the 2016 London Marathon. I am also raising money for Brain Tumour Research as well as Alzheimer's Research UK. Any donations I am fortunate enough to raise will go to these two very worthy causes which will make my seemingly endless training in the cold, wet and dark winter months worthwhile – add this to this the odd injury, illness and general soreness that comes from such a massive undertaking. Thank you for taking the time to visit my Just Giving Page. Donating through Just Giving is simple, fast and totally secure. Your details are safe with Just Giving – they’ll never sell them on or send unwanted emails. Once you donate, they’ll send your money directly to the charity. So it’s the most efficient way to donate – saving time and cutting costs for the charity. 

You can support Stuart by visiting his Just Giving page

Asset Tagging - Tracking the Duty of an Asset not the Product

by Iain Miskimmin

When we talk about asset information requirements we talk about the pieces of information we need to answer critical questions throughout the life-cycle of a “thing”.

There will be databases, documents, drawings, metadata, spreadsheets, 3D/4D/5D models and all number of pieces of information generated in many forms before we know what physical thing or product is going to fulfil that role.

We identify this virtual need and the space it occupies with a unique identifier that will help us link every instance of the asset at every stage and in whatever form it appears.

This unique identifier is called an asset tag, and it is associated with the “Duty of the Asset”.

This Duty, is the specification of what the thing needs to achieve. During the early phases of a project we know very little about what we require, but there will be critical questions that need answering with information generically defined in our AIR but attached to a specific instance.

Strategy

When we are thinking about the overall Strategy we will need to generate information on a facility level to ensure what we are creating provides the social, environmental and economical outcomes desired. In infrastructure these tags will typically be for hubs or connectors.

Concept

During the concept phase, we may just know that a structure is required in a specific location, but we have no idea of its make-up or design. Thus it is essential that we start tracking the fact that there is a need for a structure here, and pursue the questions that need to be answered. By acknowledging this, we can/should assign an asset tag at Entity level. 

Design

When we get to the Design phases, we will know much more about the make-up of the structure and be able to tag an asset down to Element level, thus providing that unique ID for each individual asset down to the maintainable level. (i.e. a window rather than the glass, sealant, hinges, locks etc.)

Construction

All the tags starting from Facility, through Entity and down to Element should be related in a hierarchy to show how assets are associated with each other and their breakdown structure.

Finally, when we arrive at construction we will have built up a set of performance requirements (the duty of the asset) and we can use this information to go and purchase a product to fulfil that role. 

Asset Register

The asset tags at various levels have appeared in all the documents, drawings and models during this build up, but the most important place for them to be is in the asset register.

This register of assets needs to be accessible from every information creating, gathering and consuming system used in the Project Information Model (PIM), ensuring the “things” mentioned in all these sources of information are linked back to the relevant asset tag. This enables us to have all the information required to answer our critical questions throughout the life-cycle.

This asset register will not only contain information about the duty of an asset, but eventually it will include information on similar products which can fulfil that need, along with all the information about the physical thing.

My advice here is to never lock this register away in a CAD package and restrict its access to a small percentage of your team. Data is for databases so that it can be analysed, reported and linked rather than duplicated.

Temporary works

We need to treat our temporary works the same way we treat our permanent assets. I am not suggesting that we tag every piece of scaffolding, but we are recommending that it is broken down into “supporting service” level, where each temporary works element supports a maintainable asset.

We should record these the same way in every drawing, document or model and ensure that they appear in the asset register to help answer any critical questions. Bear in mind that if they are abandoned in place, they will need to be handed over just like any other permanent asset.

Naming convention

There are two polarised views on how we should deal with an asset tagging strategy. One view is that the tag should contain useful information about the asset - the other view is that it should just be a unique ID that means nothing, because all the information is kept in the asset register/ database.

If you wish to put meaning into the name, then I recommend the following:

Location (Facility code) – Functional grouping code – Function – Unique numerical number.

This will allow you to understand how assets relate to each other and the function they play without needing to delve into the asset register/ database.

Open to All BIM session 23rd March

By Iain Miskimmin

On the 23^rd of March COMIT held an Open to All session aimed at giving a common understanding to all parties about this thing called “BIM”.

Even though it was sponsored by one of our technology members, Bentley Systems and we are a mobile technology community, the session was not about software but about the background, reasons, standards, methods and principles that need to be understood and linked together to really understand what it’s all about.

The 16 strong audience was made up of Owners, Contractors, Consultants, Universities and Technology vendors. Some were just starting down their BIM journey, others were BIM consultants for their organisations, which meant that the conversations and discussions surrounding each area of interest were a learning curve for everyone!

The session started with the financial crash and looking at what options the UK had for growing the economy. This spawned the Construction Strategy and ultimately the drive to deliver BIM on all government funded assets.

Taking the audience through the Government Soft Landings document and it’s vision for a more socially, economically and environmentally positive outcome for our assets, it then plunged down through the details of what is an asset, how do we break then down, and how we ought to identify the duty rather than the product.

Finally taking everyone through the 8 pillars of BIM wisdom and making sure they know why they are being asked to comply with things like COBie, Uniclass and the suite of 1192 documents.

The big lesson from the event was that we have things in place to manage, process, secure, classify, exchange, number and identify our assets, but we are still lacking the fundamental building block of WHAT information we require at each stage (not for a product but for an assets duty).

This information is needed to answer the critical questions throughout the life-cycle, but these still have not been clearly defined.

Everyone in the audience will have different critical questions to answer, depending on how they engage and interact with an asset, but they all understood that delivering the information using the same classification, asset data dictionary, templates, libraries, coordinate systems, standards and workflows ensures that there is a consistency involved that significantly reduces the risk of whole life-cycle asset procurement.

Some of the COMIT member feedback so far:

“Your fire and your enthusiasm for the topic “BIM” was absolutely infective and exemplary.” - Owner

“May everyone get the chance to join one of your presentations, you are indeed preparing the ground for reaching a new level in the construction fields.” - Owner

“I found it extremely useful and very interesting” - Contractor

“Highly impressed of what can be done and we all took inspiration and understanding with us” – Consultant

“The best BIM overview I have seen delivered anywhere. It’s a must for all people interested in this subject” - Contractor

“Presented in such a way we can all understand what our part is in the BIM story” - Academics

“Thank you for your time and extremely interesting and well-articulated presentation, even though we felt ourselves BIM aware, this session took us to new levels of understanding” – Technology Vendor

If you would like to know more about BIM or COMIT, then please visit our website or contact us to see how you could get involved.

AI Go challenge win spells boon not doom

So Google's AI has won the final game in the Go challenge against a master player - making it 4 games out of 5. If you are unfamiliar with Go or with the challenge then you might want to read the BBC story about the victory.

This has prompted a new spate of humans-doomed-by-AI stories. However, this misses one fundamental aspect that seems to be missing in a lot of the stories about AI lately - namely that they relate to the application of AI to things that people are naturally bad at.

When applying any technology to automate a human activity, be it physical or mental, it makes total sense to look at activities that human beings struggle with. After all, there has to be a commercial aspect to the application, even if to start with only in principle. Nobody would argue that mechanical excavators are a threat to a species with a finite capacity for digging, rather they are seen as a boon, so what is it with AI and games?

Games, by definition, need to be fun and an important part of that comes from the challenge they represent - they need to be hard and require some effort to learn, to play or to master. Go is a game that has a perfectly logical basis but a vast number of permutations. Part of the challenge to a human player is to persuade that three pound organ of general intelligence in our heads to apply itself to that domain. This is not easy - it is not a task for which our brains were optimised by our evolutionary past; which is part of what makes it fun.

However, those same brains can determine what are more optimal strategies and while we cannot change our brains to apply them we can embed them in machines that do - machines dedicated to that domain. So we can create computers that can beat Go Grand Masters - or even the best human players at "Jeopardy".

The mistake, is to assume that because we can do something as humans and we find it hard, that means it must be fundamentally hard to do - or alternatively, that because we find something easy, that it must be easy to do. I'm old enough to remember that in the early days of AI it was assumed that it would take a long time to develop a human-beating chess computer but a relatively short time to develop software that could understand human speech. That assumption could not have been more wrong. Chess turned out to be a relatively trivial AI problem, where as speech recognition in comparison was fiendishly difficult.

So what does this mean for the Google AI Go victory and why is this article on a construction related blog? Well, the point is that AI is getting better and better at doing the kinds of things that people find fundamentally hard to do - and as it happens the construction industry contains a great many of those things.

The way in which we currently estimate, plan, schedule, manage and design has many aspects that require human beings to make decisions that they are fundamentally bad at. Decisions where people are apt to overlook things or make mistakes or simply reach non-optimised solutions. The construction industry has made great strides in mechanising (and even automating) its physical processes and it has certainly applied computer technology to marshalling ever increasing amounts of data - but as yet the use of AI to help the decision making process is all but absent.

The application of domain-specific AI to construction could lead to as many benefits as mechanisation. It could free people up to do what people are good at and lead to major improvements in quality, efficiency, safety and most importantly for all of us working in the industry, job satisfaction. The concept of "big data" is just starting to touch on that potential but the application of the kind of AI involved in the Go challenge could and probably will be revolutionary.

So if the current AI developments are a boon, when should we start to worry? Probably when it becomes artificial general intelligence and starts to be better than us at things that human beings find easy to do. Such as understanding the meaning of something within an arbitrary context - or even convincingly demonstrating an understanding of what meaning actually is.

Oxford Brookes & Gender Balance in Construction

I had the pleasure last night of delivering the COMIT guest lecture to second-year Construction Project Management and QS students at Oxford Brookes University. Part of our remit at COMIT is to engage with the next generation of construction professionals and this fixture has become a regular event on our calender. Previous lectures have been delivered by Neill Pawsey and Stephen Smith as well as by me.

The lecture is primarily about the use of mobile computing in construction. However, I always find it helps to put things into context so I inevitably cover a number of the broader issues that the industry faces - particularly those that influence the use of technology - as well as a bit of history.

Since yesterday was International Women's Day it made sense to touch on the issue of gender balance - or more accurately imbalance - in construction. This is something that I have always been aware of and during my time working in the industry I have been pleased to see it improving.

However, it was not until I went hunting for some actual figures to use in my presentation that I realised just how bad the situation is:

(Image source: http://www.cnplus.co.uk/Pictures/web/u/v/e/Gender-balance-by-sector-ons-data-on-percentage-of-women-in-each-industry.jpg)

I was not surprised that construction is among the worst industries for gender imbalance (I expect mining would be similar if separated from energy and water), but at 12% I was surprised at just how bad it is. Especially since, as I mentioned earlier, I have seen significant improvements in my time in the industry. When I first entered construction some twenty years ago female site engineers were virtually unheard of. Now, in some companies I deal with, close to 50% of new graduate engineers are women.

This imbalance is something that has always be in evidence at COMIT community days. There have been a number of campaigns recently aimed at getting more women into engineering in general and into construction in particular. COMIT strongly supports these initiatives, but it is hard to know how best to help beyond re-posting positive messages on social media.

I was encouraged to see a number of women in the audience at Oxford Brookes and afterwards I spoke to Henry Abanda, Senior Lecturer and organiser of the event about the gender balance. Henry made a really interesting observation - although they had far fewer women on the course than men, the women tended to be among his best students.

I assumed this would be because they were more motivated - if they are seeking to join an industry that generally seems to discourage women and have overcome the societal expectation that it is a "male" career, then they must really want to be civil engineers. But Henry put me right. Almost without exception the women on the course had relatives who already worked in construction. Consequently they knew exactly what they wanted to do and exactly what they needed in order to do it.

For me this was a light-bulb moment. Women with first-hand knowledge of the industry know that it can be a rewarding and fulfilling career choice for them and while, given the poor gender balance, there are still many barriers, these are not significant enough for their relatives already in the industry to succeed in putting them off. In other words the problem is not just one of internal reality but of external perception.

I believe this is reinforced by the furore that erupted around the Construction Computing Awards ("The Hammers") last November following the sexist nature of the entertainment booked for the event. While the organisers clearly failed in their duty to ensure the material was appropriate, what strikes me is that the comedian concerned equally clearly held the view that a "construction" event was akin to a old-fashioned northern working-men's club.

This point is made by some of the commentators on Sue Butcher's excellent blog about the night. Many of those within the industry found the "entertainment" offensive, but those providing it were not familiar with the industry and clearly thought it appropriate.

Given that women only make up about 12% of the construction workforce the industry clearly has a very long way to go. However, the improvements that have taken place over the last couple of decades are dramatic. I would have imagined that would have been the hardest part - actually changing attitudes and the opportunities for women within the industry itself - but perhaps the hardest part is actually communicating those changes to the wider public.

Maybe re-posting positive messages on social media is not such an insignificant contribution to improving the gender balance in construction after all.