Showing posts with label built environment technology. Show all posts
Showing posts with label built environment technology. Show all posts

Friday 24 March 2023

The Fourth Industrial Revolution and Construction

 Technological Change and Constructing the Built Environment


I was once attacked by a colleague for, as he put it, ‘not considering the great mass of people employed in construction’. We were working for a government inquiry into collusive tendering and discussing recommendations to improve productivity and efficiency in the final report. At the time there were significant changes affecting the Australian industry that had far more impact than the legislative and regulatory reforms the inquiry led to. The industrial relations system was moving from a centralised award based one to a more decentralised system with enterprise bargaining and site agreements. International contractors were entering the market and the larger engineering and architecture practices consolidating. As the industry began to recover from a speculative office building bubble and the economy rebounded from a deep recession, construction employment increased and continued to grow for the next few decades. Construction as used here refers to all the firms and organizations involved in design, construction, repair and maintenance of the built environment.

 

Where these longer run trends were going was not obvious at the time. There have been significant changes in the range of activities and types of firms involved in construction of the built environment over the last few decades. Two trends underpinning those changes were the increasing use of multi-disciplinary project teams as the boundaries between professional disciplines became less distinct, and the inhouse versus outsourced decision about provision more common. Facilities management is an example, an activity that used to be done internally but is now often outsourced, sometimes but not always to construction contractors. Consultants bid for work as contractors, and contractors do consultancy and project management. Urban planning was once primarily associated with design, but is now linked to real estate and development. The process of structural change in industry occurs as technology, institutional and firm capabilities develop and change over decades.



Figure 1.

When considering the relationship between construction of the built environment and technological change the past is really the only guide available, so the starting point for this discussion is the first industrial revolution in England at the beginning of the nineteenth century when modern construction and its distinctive culture began to form, followed by the twentieth century’s attempts to industrialise construction. This history is important because, after more than 200 years of development, construction of the built environment happens today within an established system of production based on a complex framework of rules, regulations, institutions, traditions and habits that have evolved over this long period of time.

 

But how useful is history and how can it be used? Are there appropriate historical examples or cases to study to see if there are lessons relevant to the present? The answers depend to a large extent on context, because a key characteristic of the history of technology is the importance of institutions and the political and social context of economic outcomes. Also, understanding how policies were developed in the past and how effective they were requires understanding the changing context of policy implementation. However, as economist Paul Samuelson pointed out ‘history doesn't tell its own story and ‘conjectures based on theory and testing against data’ are needed to uncover it. Drawing the right lessons from history is a nuanced exercise. 

 

Over time industries and products evolve and develop as their underlying knowledge base and technological capabilities increase. The starting point for a cycle of development is typically a major new invention, something that is significant enough to lead to fundamental changes in demand (the function, type and number of buildings), design (the opportunities new materials offer), or delivery (through project management). Major inventions give a ‘technological shock’ to an existing system of production, which leads to a transition period where incumbent firms have to adjust to the new business environment and new entrants appear to take advantage of the new technology. Economist Joseph Schumpeter called this process creative destruction, and it leads to the restructuring and eventually consolidation of industries. That is what happened to construction and related suppliers of professional services, materials and components after the first industrial revolution. 

 

The drivers of development for industries in the twenty-first century are emerging technologies such as augmented reality, nanotechnology, machine intelligence, digital fabrication, robotics, automation, exoskeletons and possibly human augmentation. Collectively, these digital technologies are described as a fourth industrial revolution, and their capabilities can be expected to significantly improve as new applications and programs emerge with the development of intelligent machines trained in specific tasks. Innovation and technological change is pushing against what are now long-established customs and practices of the industries in the diverse value chain that designs and delivers the projects that become the built environment.

 

How technological change affects these industries differs from more widely studied industries like computers, automobiles or aerospace because of the number and diversity of firms involved in designing, constructing and managing the built environment. With the range of separate industries these firms come from, construction of the built environment is the output of a broad industrial sector made up of over a dozen individual industries. Not an ‘industry’ narrowly defined, but a broad industrial sector that is organised into a system of production with distinctive characteristics. A second difference is the age of these industries, many of which are mature industries in late stages of their life cycle. These differences create a different context for questions about industry, innovation and technological change, about how firms compete and how the system of production is organised as fourth industrial revolution technologies like digital twins and drones spread through construction and the pace of digitization increases. 

 

As well as the contractors, subcontractors and suppliers for new builds, there are also many firms and people mainly engaged in the alteration, repair and maintenance of the built environment. The broad base of small firms is a distinctive feature of construction, and these family-owned firms engaged in repair and maintenance work will largely continue to use the materials and processes they are familiar with. Old technologies can survive long after the innovations that eventually replace them arrived, such as the telegraph, fax machine and vinyl records with telephones, email and CDs. Stone, tile, brick and wood have been widely used materials for millennia, and industrialized materials like corrugated iron and concrete are ubiquitous. For maintaining and repairing the existing stock of buildings and structures, many of the skills, technologies and materials found today will continue to be used far into the future. That does not mean firms mainly involved in repair and maintenance will not be affected in some way by the fourth industrial revolution. 



Figure 2. 


Construction of the built environment has characteristic organizational and institutional features because it is project-based with complex professional and contractual relationships. How firms utilise technology and develop technological capabilities differentiates them within this location-based system of production. Emerging technologies in design, fabrication and control have the potential to transform construction over the next few decades, possibly less, and the book suggests firms will follow low, medium or high-tech technological trajectories, determined by their investment in the emerging technologies of the fourth industrial revolution. 

 

A broad view of what future construction might look like is based on successful solutions being found for the many institutional and technical problems involved in transferring fourth industrial revolution technologies to construction. Without downplaying the difficulty of those problems, similar challenges have been met in the past, but those solutions led in turn to a reorganization of the system of production. 

 

There are very many possible futures that could unfold over the next few decades as technologies like artificial intelligence (AI), automation and robotics develop. However, the key technology underpinning these further developments is intelligent machines operating in a connected but parallel digital world with varying degrees of autonomy. These are machines that have been trained to use data in specific but limited ways, turning data into information to interact with each other and work with humans. The tools, techniques and data sets needed for machine learning are becoming more accessible for experiment and model building, and new products like generative design for buildings plans, drone monitoring of onsite work and 3D concrete printers are available.

 

Intelligent machines are moving from controlled environments, like car manufacturing or social media, to unpredictable environments, like driving a truck. In many cases, like remote trucks and trains on mining sites, the operations are run as a partnership between humans and machines. There are also autonomous machines like autopilots in aircraft and the Mars rovers. As well as rapid development of machine intelligence, technological change in the form of new materials, new production processes and organizational systems is also happening. Sensors and scanners are widely used, 3D concrete printing is no longer experimental, cloud-based digital twins are available as a service, and online platforms coordinate design, manufacture and delivery of building components using digital twins. 

 

A period of restructuring of construction occurred in the second half of the 1800s when the new industrial materials of glass, steel and reinforced concrete arrived, bringing with them new business models, new entrants and an expanded range of possibilities. The development of modern construction was not, however, a smooth upward path of progress and betterment. It went in fits and starts as new inventions and innovations arrived, slowly then quickly, often against critics of the modern system of production and workers, fearing technological unemployment and lack of government support during a time of technological transition, who resisted new technology and sometimes sabotaged equipment. The issue in the past, like today, was in fact not the availability of jobs but the quality of skills during the diffusion of new technologies through industry. 

 

The only previous comparable period of disruptive technological change in construction of the built environment is the second half of the nineteenth century. Between 1850 and 1900 construction saw the rise of large, international contractors, who reorganized project management and delivery around steam powered machinery and equipment. In particular, the disruptive new technologies of steel, glass and concrete, which came together in the last decades of the century, led to fundamental changes in both processes and products. If that is any guide, we can expect technological changes to operate today over the same three areas of industrialization of production, mechanization of work, and organization of projects that they did then. And today, just as in 1820 when no-one knew how different construction would be and what industry would look like in 1900, we can’t see construction in 2100. That is a long way out, and we can only guess at the level of future technology. We can, however, use what we already know from both history and the present to form a view of what is possible over the next few decades based on what is currently understood to be technologically feasible.

It should be clear that the role of fourth industrial revolution technologies will be to augment human labour in construction of the built environment, not replace it. Generative design software does not replace architects or engineers. Optimization of logistics or maintenance by AI does not replace mechanics. Onsite construction is a project-based activity using standardized components to deliver a specific building or structure in a specific location. The nature of a construction site means automated machinery and equipment will have to be constantly monitored and managed by people, with many of their current skills still relevant but applied in a different way. Nevertheless, in the various forms that building information models, digital twins, AI, 3D printing, digital fabrication and procurement platforms take on their way to the construction site, they will become central to many of the tasks and activities involved. Education and training pathways and industry policies with incentives for labour-friendly technology will be needed.



Figure 3.


 

Because construction involves so many firms and people the technology driven changes discussed here will have significant and profound economic and social consequences. This would be a good opportunity for government and industry to work together to develop policies and roadmaps for those firms, and to support ‘the great mass of people’ employed in construction of the built environment who will be affected by them. The future is not determined, although technological change and creative destruction continue to reshape and restructure industry and the economy, decisions made today create the future.


 

 

From the Introduction to my new book available from Amazon on technological change and construction. 








Monday 29 March 2021

Construction Tech on the Move

 Startups are Starting to Come to Market


Over the last few months there has been a series of capital raises and an IPO for Australian construction technology companies. This is a highly competitive landscape that is developing quickly with a focus on large scale procurement platforms. The table does not include the many local startups with products for site inspections and defects, safety and compliance and so on.

In a nice example of spillover effects, after the sale of Aconex founders Rob Phillpot and Leigh Jasper set up Xenoca and Significant Capital Ventures as VC funds for joint investments, and have invested in one IPO and four startups that have disclosed capital raises. Leigh Jasper has also invested with Ian Beatty and Salta Capital’s Andrew Sypkes and David Tarascio in venture fund SecondQuarter, which has raised $50m+ and has invested in Propeller (3D mapping), and ActivePipe (real estate marketing).

Leigh Jasper is also on the board of Salta Properties. Salta and Smorgon backed the modular Tribe Hotel designed by Mark and Melissa Peters and built in Perth in 2018 by Probuild, with Mantra as operator. Mantra was acquired by Accor, who announced in March 2019 plans to develop more than 50 of the modular hotels.




Taronga Ventures
Taronga Ventures “invests in emerging innovation, technology and business models shaping the future of the built environment. We offer direct venture investment, as well as programs and advisory services to support the growth of our portfolio companies and their impact on the traditional real estate sector.” They also have a few construction tech investments. Their RealTech fund was launched last year, the program director is Julian Kezelman. Their startups are:



Procurement platforms are looking like the next big thing in construction tech. In the UK Pagabo launched a procurement platform in February, mainly for the public sector, using framework agreements. Here is their relevant page which says:“Benefit from streamlined procurement and best value on all your mid-sized construction projects through our National Framework for Medium Works.Running until December 2022, this fully OJEU compliant Framework can be used to commission a full range of building works, valued between £250k to £10m.Providing real value and competition, it includes 46 regional and national contractors, split across 3 project value bands. And there’s complete flexibility in how you award your contract - either Direct Award your preferred contractor or go through a Further Competition with a selected few.”




Wednesday 3 March 2021

The digital construction production system

Where is the technological frontier in Construction?

 

 

The fourth industrial revolution has already affected the construction industry through demand for structures for renewable energy and buildings like data centres, warehouses, ‘dark’ kitchens and supermarkets for online delivery services. Some of these buildings and structures already use forms of applied AI in their management and operation.

 

The construction industry is wide and diverse, and the various parts of the digital construction production system are in various stages of development. Over time the development of AI and associated digital fabrication and production technologies will reshape the existing industryled by fundamental changes in demand (the function, type and number of buildings), design (the opportunities new materials offer), and delivery (through project management). However, these developments are  

 

Automation technology is at the point where intelligent machines are moving from operating comfortably in controlled environments, in manufacturing or social media, to unpredictable environments, like driving a car or truck. In many cases, like remotely controlled and autonomous trucks and trains on mining sites, the operations are run as a partnership between humans and machines, or as Brynjolfsson and McAfee put it “running with the machines not against them”. These innovations might reasonably be expected to affect site processes and project organization, as concrete and steam power did in the past. Table 1 has examples of where the technological frontier was in 2020 for plant and equipment and construction materials, as an indication of the range and extent of this wave of innovations. Missing from these lists is smart contracts using blockchain. 

 

Invention and innovation based around BIM, digital twins, digital fabrication and advanced manufacturing technology is starting to fundamentally affect the construction production system through economies of scale. Over time this will alter the balance between on-site and off-site production of building modules and components, and how they are handled, assembled and integrated. Because there are many different types of building in many places, production methods vary widely across the industry, so the use of these new materials and technologies will be varied. 

 

Transport costs have always been important, but the option of site production has been limited due to standardization of mass produced components. The combination of BIM, online design databases and digital fabrication allows on-site production of some building components. Combining robotic and automated machinery with digital fabrication and standardized parts opens up many possibilities. 

 

Past technological changes in construction operated over the three dimensions of industrialization of production, mechanization of work, and organization of projects. Automation and AI can also be expected to work along these dimensions as the fourth industrial revolution reconfigures them by linking data through the life of a project. The role of AI enhanced cloud-based platforms that integrate design, production and delivery of components and materials with digital production technologies that allow mass customisation will be significant in the production of components and materials.

 

Table 1. Examples of the construction technological frontier in 2020

Plant and equipment

New materials

Autodesk BUILD Space – Boston

UK construction manufacturing hub

Exoskeletons – Esko, HULK

Remote control equipment – CAT, Komatsu

Drone monitoring – Skycatch, Icon, Vinci

Smart helmets –  Trimble Hololens, Daqri

Platforms – Katerra Apollo, Project Frog

Build autonomous skidsteer

FBR Robotics ‘Wall as a service’ 

Otis ‘Elevator as a service’

Sensor fitted cranes

Automated engineered wood factories

3D concrete printing with boom system – ICON, Aris, 3D Constructor

3D concrete printing with gantry suspended nozzle – D-Shape, BIG, US Marines

Onsite metal printing – GE, MX3D, Aurora 

3D printing of combined steel and concrete

Roller press printing of smart fabrics 

4D printing of shape memory materials 

Molecular engineering of materials  

Improved concrete additives and sealants

Components with cloud-linked sensors

Cloud-based fixtures and fittings

 

Source: Company and industry reports.

 

For mechanization, the characteristic changeability of construction sites is challenging for automated and robotic systems, and it might take decades of investment for machines able to do site work or for humanoid robots to do human tasks. In some case a human supervisor operating a team of robots or several pieces of equipment, each with limited autonomy, might work better. A worker with a smart helmet could monitor these machines both on the project and in the site model. Beyond site preparation however, there may not be many tasks left if site processes are restructured around components and modules that are designed to be assembled in a particular way, and machines to assemble those components and modules can be fabricated for that purpose. For an industry with an aging workforce there is the potential of exoskeletons for site work, a form of human augmentation that combines human skill with machine strength.

 

For organization of projects digital platforms providing building design, component and module specification, fabrication, logistics and delivery can be expected to become widely used. Platforms provide outsourced business processes, usually cheaply because they are standardized, and are available to large and small firms. Also, platforms use forms of AI to monitor and manage the data they produce, the function of intelligent machines. Examples are Linkedin (matching jobs and people), Skype (simultaneous translation of video calls), AWS and other cloud-computing providers, and marketing, legal and accounting software systems. Cheap, outsourced, cloud-based business processes can lower fixed costs and thus firm size, because firms can focus on their core competency and purchases services as necessary as they scale, leading to more entry and more innovation. If these digitised business processes are cost-effective and become widely used, they can provide much of the data needed to train machines as project information managers.

 

The BIM model of the project links the design and fabrication stages to the site and the project[i]. Digital fabrication produces components and modules designed to be integrated with on-site preparatory work and assembled to meet strict tolerances. Project management would be more focused on information management, and the primary role of a construction contractor might evolve into managing a new combination of site preparation work and integration of the building or structure with components and modules, some of which may be produced on-site in a Fab if economies of scale permit. 

 

In this case, the industry would, perhaps slowly, reorganise around firms that best manage on-site and off-site integration of digitally fabricated parts. With outsourced business processes and standardized site and structural work, that would be a key competitive advantage of a construction firm. Firms would become more vertically integrated if they become fabricators as well, reinventing a business model from the past when large general contractors often had their own carpentry workshops, brick pits or glass works and so on.    

 

While firms involved in construction of the built environment are facing technological advances that will affect many aspects of the technological system, this is a process that happens over years and decades. It takes 30 to 50 years between invention of a major new technology like cars or computers and its use becoming widespread, examples are discovering the double-helix and biotechnology, the dynamo and electricity, and the first electronic computers in the 1940s. 

 

How long a transition to a new production system largely built on automation and digital fabrication coordinated by AI takes might take is unknown. While machines can replicate individual tasks, integrating different capabilities and getting everything to work together is another matter. Combining a range of technologies is needed for workplace automation, but solving problems involves specific technical and organizational challenges, and once the technical feasibility has been resolved and the technologies become commercially available it can take many years before they are adopted. 

 

This suggests there will be many new roles emerging in construction over coming years, for project information managers, BIM supervisors, integration specialists and other fourth industrial revolution workers. Because these jobs will be primarily on new projects, they will not quickly replace the many existing jobs in the industry that maintain the built environment. 

 

Nevertheless, the technological frontier is moving again, and new construction projects will generally utilise the most cost-effective technology. Current AI technology provides services such as GPS navigation and trip planning, spam filters, language recognition and translation, credit checks and fraud alerts, book and music recommendations, and energy management systems. It is being used in law, transport, education, healthcare and security, and for engineering, economic and scientific modelling. Advanced manufacturing is almost entirely automated. 

 

In the various forms that AI and digital fabrication takes on their way to the construction site, they will become central to many of the tasks and activities involved. In this, building and construction may no different from other industries and activities, however the path of AI in construction will be distinct and different from the path taken in other industries. This path dependence can vary not just from industry to industry, but from firm to firm as well.

 



[i] In 2019 the International Standard 19650 was released, providing a framework for creating, managing and sharing digital data on built assets. https://www.iso.org/obp/ui/#iso:std:iso:19650:-1:ed-1:v1:en 

Wednesday 21 October 2020

Construction 4.0 Book

 

CONSTRUCTION 4.0

An Innovation Platform for the Built Environment

Edited by Anil Sawhney, Mike Riley and Javier Irizarry

 

 


 A new book on Construction 4 from Routledge. As the table of contents below show, it is a comprehensive  review of the state of play as the technologies of industry 4 get adapted and adopted to construction. The book is good evidence that the built environment industries can (should? will?) be a leading sector for application of these technologies. From the book's introduction:

Modelled on the concept of Industry 4.0, the idea of Construction 4.0 is based on a confluence of trends and technologies that promise to reshape the way built environment assets are designed, constructed, and operated. With the pervasive use of Building Information Modelling (BIM), lean principles, digital technologies, and offsite construction, the industry is at the cusp of this transformation. The critical challenge is the fragmented state of teaching, research, and professional practice in the built environment sector. This handbook aims to overcome this fragmentation by describing Construction 4.0 in the context of its current state, emerging trends and technologies, and the people and process issues that surround the coming transformation.

Construction 4.0 is a framework that is a confluence and convergence of the following broad themes discussed in this book:

• Industrial production (prefabrication, 3D printing and assembly, offsite manufacture)

• Cyber-physical systems (actuators, sensors, IoT, robots, cobots, drones)

• Digital and computing technologies (BIM, video and laser scanning, AI and cloud computing,

big data and data analytics, reality capture, Blockchain, simulation, augmented

reality, data standards and interoperability, and vertical and horizontal integration)

 

The book has 28 chapters. Part 1 has 4 chapters discussing the idea of cyber-physical systems. Part 3 has 4 case studies. The core of the book is Part 2 where the elements of C4.0 are identified and current developments explained. These chapters are:

Potential of cyber-physical systems in architecture and construction

Lauren Vasey and Achim Menges

Applications of cyber-physical systems in construction

Abiola A. Akanmu and Chimay J. Anumba

A review of mixed-reality applications in Construction 4.0

Aseel Hussien, Atif Waraich, and Daniel Paes

Overview of optoelectronic technology in Construction 4.0

Erika A. Pärn

The potential for additive manufacturing to transform the construction industry

Seyed Hamidreza Ghaffar, Jorge Corker, and Paul Mullett

Digital fabrication in the construction sector

Keith Kaseman and Konrad Graser

Using BIM for multi-trade prefabrication in construction

Mehrdad Arashpour and Ron Wakefield

Data standards and data exchange for Construction 4.0

Dennis R. Shelden, Pieter Pauwels, Pardis Pishdad-Bozorgi, and Shu Tang

Visual and virtual progress monitoring in Construction 4.0

Jacob J. Lin and Mani Golparvar-Fard

Unmanned Aerial System applications in construction

Masoud Gheisari, Dayana Bastos Costa, and Javier Irizarry

Future of robotics and automation in construction

Borja Garcia de Soto and Miroslaw J. Skibniewski

Robots in indoor and outdoor environments

Bharadwaj R. K. Mantha, Borja Garcia de Soto, Carol C. Menassa, and Vineet R. Kamat

Domain-knowledge enriched BIM in Construction 4.0: design-for-safety and crane safety cases

Md. Aslam Hossain, Justin K. W. Yeoh, Ernest L. S. Abbott, and David K. H. Chua

Internet of things (IoT) and internet enabled physical devices for Construction 4.0

Yu-Cheng Lin and Weng-Fong Cheung

Cloud-based collaboration and project management

Kalyan Vaidyanathan, Koshy Varghese, and Ganesh Devkar

Use of blockchain for enabling Construction 4.0

Abel Maciel