Page 16 - EngineerIt April 2021

AUTOMATION

The CDE is squarely in the middle of the design process,
empowering innovators to work with one single source of truth.
The advantage of a data driven environment is that all changes
throughout the process are recorded and remain available
throughout the life of the project.

Cloud collaboration
Construction is a team effort. As a result, individual excellence
alone is not enough. The entire team needs to collaborate as one
seamless operation. Design and construction firms will continue
the remote collaboration practices they adopted in 2020.
In 2021, they will continue to push projects to the cloud at an
accelerated rate, in pursuit of an end-to-end digital workflow. The
last 12 months have allowed teams and companies to become
accustomed to this method of working, with many of the initial
teething problems now ironed out. as contractors realise that prefab construction dramatically
As businesses become increasingly comfortable with this accelerates project timelines.
way of working, they will become even more efficient and It can be likened to Lego, where many elements of a
productive. In every project one learns something new, some building are built offsite in a controlled factory environment.
aspects that perhaps can be executed better, or an error that On building sites, one is dependent on the weather and often
occurred can be prevented from recurring in future projects. The space constraints. The prefabricating of many elements of
more we engage in CDE, the more efficiently projects will be a building and simply lifting prefabricated units into place
carried out in the future. on the building site will greatly improve timelines. With this
approach, quality can be better controlled and it often also
Industrialised construction results in cost savings.
Industrialised construction isn’t just about using manufacturing A good example of industrialised construction would be
techniques in construction, it’s about the convergence of to have modular school classrooms stored, so that when the
industries, processes, workflows and functional data within need arises, a school can be replaced within weeks instead of
design, construction, manufacturing and operation. months. In the case of schools that were destroyed in Limpopo
Industrialised construction techniques such as design a few years ago, with preconstructed classrooms, the rebuilding
for manufacture and assembly will be adopted by many process could be completed in a relatively short period of time.
contractors and become a pillar of the industry’s resilience
Automation
As the AEC industry is increasingly challenged to find the fittest
solution in the shortest time, automation will become an integral
part of the industry’s toolkit.
The AEC industry wants to get things done faster; it wants
to have the ability to take the big, tedious design tasks and finish
them in the time it takes to make a fresh pot of coffee. This is
where automation can help.
With automation, the focus can be on the design tasks
that made someone want to be a designer in the first place,
while the technology automates the tedious tasks that hold the
designer back.
Computational and generative design techniques and
collaborative robotics will speed up the digital design and physical
manufacturing processes. Embracing automation will get the
industry a step closer to making its data work for it.
The AEC industry is well and truly on the path towards a
digital future. Businesses that lagged behind or were slow to
adopt these technologies are being overtaken.
As the pandemic has so clearly highlighted, it is essential for
companies to become agile and resilient so that they are capable
of taking the challenges they face in their stride.
The trends highlighted here will enable the AEC industry to be
far better placed in an increasingly uncertain world long after the
pandemic ends. n

Simon Bromfield can be contacted at
Simon Bromfield simon.bromfield@autodesk.com

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