BIM, the cornerstone of industrialised construction

Digital technologies ensure innovation and process optimisation to achieve a sustainable and efficient production

Life Habitat Hospitalet de 011h

Humanity’s basic needs have always been food, clothing, water, and shelter. Globally, all four of these requirements for human life have been industrialised, except one: construction. Industrialised construction is an everyday occurrence in Japan or Sweden, but remains a rarity in Spain. This alternative way of making buildings consists of creating designs in digital form and manufacturing its parts in a factory. Once this part of the process is complete, the material gets transferred to the construction site for assembly. Hence its other name: offsite.

The objective is simple: to industrially manufacture the maximum number of elements that will then shape the finished building. Currently, industrialised construction is very limited in Spain, as it scarcely has a production capacity of 1,000 housing units per year. That constitutes barely 1% of the total number of new homes. “The percentage of industrialised housing reaches 7% in the United Kingdom, 9% in Germany, 50% in Holland and practically 100% in Sweden”, specifies José María Quirós, Industrialisation Delegate of AEDAS Homes.

For Quirós, the sector that needs to make the greatest leap towards industrialisation is the residential sector. “We are still building houses as we did a century ago, and it is not sustainable. Industrialisation eliminates the ambiguity in costs, bringing shorter delivery times, greater sustainability and higher quality of execution, among other advantages”, explains the developer’s delegate. However, at present, buyers are faced with the fact that the current prices of industrially built housing are equal to traditional homes, due to the low production capacity of the industry.

Still, industrialisation offers multiple benefits. According to the report Industrialised and Sustainable Housing by Aedas Homes and B Leaf, offsite housing represents a 60% reduction in CO2 emissions in its construction and 30% in its use. In addition, they reduce water consumption in their manufacture and maintenance and require between 40% and 75% less energy for air conditioning and heating. This makes the industrialisation of construction processes the antithesis of on-site production. One word can summarize it all: sustainability.

And that’s not all. If we want to make industrialised construction even more attractive, manufacturing components in factories means safer conditions for workers and a considerable reduction of accidents on the job. “The consequent modernisation of the sector makes it possible to attract young and female talent, as well as provide a safer environment for the workers,” Quirós assures. Moreover, since parts production occurs in factories rather than on-site, construction projects are not subject to the weather’s mercy, considerably reducing building times and costs.

Sounds good, doesn’t it? But there is one interesting detail: industrialised construction requires projects to be conceived as such from the outset by designers, manufacturers and all the various players involved in the project. This is why digitalisation, innovation and Building Information Modelling (BIM) are the cornerstones that connect and facilitate communication and work between all of the involved parties in a project. This is precisely the core of the digital consultancy firm’s work, Modelical. “As of now, there is no set procedure or software application that can bring all of these pieces together. Both designers and manufacturers use different applications, and there is no unified language to transfer information between parties,” explains Iván Pajares, BuiltTech Specialist at Modelical.

In this sense, Spanish construction startup 011h is at the forefront of innovation. In addition to its commitment to smart and sustainable construction, the company is currently developing a digital platform to orchestrate, in real-time, the automation of processes and connections necessary to develop projects. “Their concept is one of the examples aiming at the right direction,” Iván argues.

Facilitating processes is the focus of the specialised work of digital consultancies such as Modelical. “To create an industrialised project, you have to think about the system and integrate it from the start, because you cannot design, build or manufacture if the system cannot take it on board. All the agents must take each other into account from the beginning, and that is where we can help them because we know how to connect the tools used by each of them”, Iván Pajares states.

TRUST, DIGITALISATION AND INNOVATION

On the other hand, the nature of industrialised construction requires all parties involved in the project to nurture trustworthy relationships with one another. This trust is not usually encouraged in conventional construction bidding contract models. “Making a project industrialised means working together and trusting each other from the beginning of the process,” Pajares points out. Thus, the complexity and success of industrialised projects imply that they must be planned millimetrically by all parties in advance. Therefore, information, shared models, collaborative workflows, databases, and real interoperability are crucial to creating open and cooperative models.

Hence, one of the great attractions of industrialised construction is the automation of processes. This helps reduce homes’ delivery time between 9 and 12 months, whereas conventional construction housing can take between 18 and 24 months. “If a building has thousands of components and these are automated instead of made by hand, the time savings are quite considerable,” says Iván Pajares. In these procedures, Modelical offers the ability to innovate and test interconnections between the various parts that have never previously been put into practice. “As a company, we bring our experience to the table because as experts in digital project management, we innovate techniques for transferring information”, explains the architect.

As an added bonus, industrialisation makes it possible to create systems that can be reutilised in other projects. “Construction is based on shared knowledge and reusing it also means guaranteeing its preservation. But it can only be achieved if you maintain the same teams or structures that assure the preservation of this knowledge”. Thus, the industrialisation of construction processes and their digitalisation are two wings of the same bird. In this sense, since the complexity and precision of industrial processes require the optimisation of all procedures, cost, waste, and completion times are significantly reduced.

All this is possible thanks to advanced IT and artificial intelligence tools that facilitate processes and remove communication obstacles between the parties. Thus, the constant innovation, open information flow, and process optimisation provided by companies working with BIM methodology are the backbones for assuring a smooth development of industrialisation in the construction sector.

Author: Sol Acuña