From Bricks to Clicks

BACKGROUND 

BAM Nuttall (http://www.bamnuttall.co.uk/), a UK Civil Engineering company, now part of the Royal BAM group (https://www.bam.com/), a 7 billion Euro engineering conglomerate. BAM Nuttall has a long and distinguished history of working on major construction and infrastructure projects, for example the London 2012 Olympics and the current UK Cross-Rail project.

BAM Nuttall have a vision of transforming the construction industry from Bricks to Clicks with Open Collaboration, Proactive Ownership, Predictable Performance, and Scalable Learning.

In a drive to increase on-site productivity and operational performance in the construction industry, BAM Nuttall has teamed up with tech firm IOTICS to exploit the potential of digital twin technology.

Colin Evison, Head of Innovation at BAM Nuttall said of partnering with IOTICS “overall, lessons are learned and opportunities are uncovered within the virtual environment that can be applied to the physical world and used to transform a business. This is a real opportunity to explore how we can make construction projects smarter by the adoption and development of technology solutions which have not been traditionally available before.”

The Goal is a comprehensive twin of every site

To achieve this goal BAM Nuttall recognised the need to just start and iteratively developing, asset tracking and management, exploiting contractual provisions for data, enabling rapid dispute resolution, maximising ROI from IT/OT investments. Incrementally improving pre-construction accuracy.

Most importantly BAM Nuttall looked to exploit IOTICS’s twin-based interoperable ecosystem to integrate every source and consumer once, for multiple deployment

In short “how can we improve productivity today, and two, how can we build on this to improve future projects?”.

THE FIRST USE CASE

BAM Nuttall and their partner IOTICS teamed up with researchers at Cranfield University to develop an AI-based, computer-vision system based on a digital twin environment.

The Learning Camera employs a standard webcam, integrated with an IoT framework of smart sensors to collect real-time environmental data such as wind speed and weather conditions, combined with contextual information including location, date and time. All this data is fed into a cloud-based system to create digital twins of every element, which bridge the physical and virtual world.

An IOTICS digital twin is an autonomous and interoperable twin of any ‘thing’ or asset with all its data and controls that can interact, interrelate and behave in a digital environment as its twinned counterpart in the real world. Pairing these two worlds with the Learning Camera enables the monitoring and analysis of on-site data to identify and head off problems before they cause potential delays, accidents and increased costs, while also helping with future planning by being able to run accurate simulations with real data.

In particular, cameras can be programmed to recognise abnormal activity on a construction site 24 hours a day and generate alerts so that someone can attend to rectify any problems. This reduces the need for repetitive on-site checks and security monitoring in hazardous areas and all-weather conditions.

Using Interoperable Twins from IOTICS has already enabled the productization and commercialisation of the Learning Camera, while IOTICS’s capabilities have enabled a broad vision supporting Safety Management, Improved Productivity, Automated Construction Management. Additionally, BAM ins transforming the industry with new partnerships with BRE, councils and Balfour Beatty amongst others. 

EXPLOITING DIGITAL TWINS

Using Interoperable Twins from IOTICS, BAM Nuttall are converting data into meaningful events, semantically modelled Twins that enable data-based decisions, providing a single access to truth across a fractured a highly changeable data estate.

Creating machine readable digital Twins that can securely interact across their supply chain BAM Nuttall are turning legacy liabilities into smart assets, creating new revenue streams, products and services.

Functioning as a digital backbone throughout the company, interoperable twins from IOTICS can interrelate BIM models, project plans, live contextual information, environmental data, IOT devices, physical asset management and operational tools.

“We have all this equipment on sites, but no information about it…we just didn’t collect or use it anywhere. Many of [the suppliers] offer us an app to monitor their bit of kit, but that’s not much use to us. The value of the IOTICS approach is that it’s made it easy for the team to connect different applications and help them work together.”