Paul Granlund

Transcription

The topic is of course very very wide and I'm looking at it from certain angle and not of course covering everything. My own specialities is really building information modelling. I've been working now in the development of that for 20 years, and that is going to be the context that I'm speaking about. The sustainability and how those two things are related to each other. We all of course know that the definition of sustainable development, that sustainable development meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. This is the foundation of sound development in the world, and when we think about how important it is, we think about the really extreme weather conditions that we have in our days more and more around the world. It is really something that's a burning issue. I think in a way this was a very iconic photograph that changed the way that we are seeing the world. I remember very well myself, I was 18 years old when the man landed on the moon for the first time. Started to really see how small that our planet is. But the way that we live now days is really overdoing, overusing the resources that we have on the earth. If you think about the European Union lifestyle, it would require three globes if everybody would be living on that level. U.S., and my understanding, also Australia is about at the level that we would need five globes to sustain that living. And of course now, the question mark is when we think about China or India. How the population is growing there, how are their living standards, and the expectations of people are growing. We can't simply go on the way we have been living, and on the other hand we can't expect that the Chinese and Indian people would except that we would say to them that they are not entitled to have the same level of standard that we have. So we really have to think about what to do about that. Anyway we are speaking about, let's say, more than 40% of the energy that we are using is related to the buildings, so it's actually the biggest energy consumption in the world, and also it's one third of the greenhouse gas emissions are coming from the buildings. This means that we really have to take the challenge of the greenhouse gas emissions very very seriously. We are wasting construction materials on-site. As you can see 2-3% of the construction costs are because of material waste, and this means that about 10-15% of the material on-site are wasted. And at the end of the day 28% of those materials in the UK are becoming waste. So, as you can see 420 million tonnes of material and then construction is still delivering 120 tonnes of waste every year. And landfill, its about one third again. And then when we think about how we are using our labour force, and the waste is even bigger. There are again, a little bit different figures, but this is coming from Chuck Eastman from Georgia Tech, claiming that value-added work on-site is 10% of the time of the people working on-site. More than half of time is wasted and then the supported parties is quite big. Compared to other industries we are doing really really badly at that. And, when thinking about our acknowledgement to the carbon reduction. This is UK's commitment globally to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions, and when you look at the figures its a climatical challenge that we are facing in that. When you think about what has happened now since 2010, we are definitely not on the line where we should be. We haven't been as efficient as we should, which means that the challenge is getting harder and harder all the time. It means that we have to do quite a lot to existing buildings, which is about renovation, refurbishment. Not only the new buildings about which we have to start thinking. We need to think how to do that. And then, when I'm using the term BIM, I'm think that it's worthwhile to define a little bit what I mean by that, because there are different definitions, and from my understanding not everybody here is necessarily an expert on the construction industry or the information technology for the construction industry. One way to define BIM is that it's the virtual representation of the building, so its really the end result of that building information model. But it can also mean building information modelling, meaning that the process of producing that information and also managing that information. Personally I like much more about the term "building information management", because modelling is actually a relatively small part of the work. It is the part where we are creating the information. But when we think about the life-cycle of the buildings, management of that information. Already the construction phase is actually much, much bigger involved than the modelling. Also in the model there is one problem. Many people, when you start speaking about the building information model, they immediately think the 3D model, and many people really think that the 3D model and BIM are synonyms, which they are not. Really its much more about the information, so personally I think that it might be worthwhile changing the terminology, so that we would start speaking about "Asset Information Management". The reason for this is that, the infrastructure people don't easily understand that BIM is also something that is important for them. Of course we are not thinking when we are speaking about the roads, or rail roads, or power-lines that they are buildings. They are definitely built environment. But Asset Information Management might be the best term when we speak about that, and really the emphasis should be on the information, not on the model. That is my personal view. Its much easier to understand the content of the BIM when thinking about information-centric viewpoint of that. The one reason that why we started to develop BIM along time ago. Of course the idea itself is really old. Chuck Eastman wrote his first paper about BIM already in 1975, so the idea is not something new. The implementation and the practises is much newer, and when we started the international BIM program in Finland, which I was leading, in 1997 -- 2002, this was one of the basic images that we were using. The problem was already then and still today, largely that that even though everyone is using computers we are exchanging the information quite often on documents, and even if we are sending electronic documents, they are really documents, meaning that they are human readable. And when we send them to other participants in the processes it means that people have to recreate the information from the documents into their systems. And it is not added value in the processes, instead we have very good possibilities to create new errors and also its very time-consuming. There was a study in the late 90s in the UK claiming that every bit of information used in the construction process is recreated seven times during the process so it is a huge waste of work that we are doing. And the basic idea of integrated BIM projects is that we are producing that information in a format where the data directly usable for other software products. So instead of having the situation where the architectural drawings are given to the quantitative surveyor who starts measuring the things, we can really get the quantities directly from the model into the cost estimations. So we don't have to recreate that, which of course makes the process much easier especially because we have so many changes typically at the end of the construction process. However, construction industry is facing one really big problem. Our industry is not easy to change. It is very difficult to change the way that we are working, and as a consequence of that is these well-known figures that the development of productivity in our industry has been very bad. In U.S.A negative, in Finland slightly positive, but very little compared to the other industries they are in exactly the same situation as you can see yourself. In UK, there was a small improvement in the early 90s or mid 90s, but than after that they came to the same situation again. And this is definitely something that we should somehow be able to solve, that increasing the productivity. Also one of the strengths of our industry, our ability to start new projects very fluently without any major arrangements, has become actually a problem. Earlier when I was speaking with, let's say, with people from the information technologies, they were really admiring our ability to start a new project. Everybody knows exactly what is his role, what is expected from him. But now when the technologies and processes are changing this is actually becoming a hindrance. It is preventing us to see what is really needed. We are so stuck in the old fashion way to think about that, we should be producing these drawings in this scale at this stage, but we are not thinking about the information flows and contents in the processes. So this is one of the big challenges also for the education, how to get people to understand what the processes should be. To go beyond the old way of documenting things. And, because we live in a project-base, in project-based industries, it's very difficult to make these kind of changes that are affecting in the different partners in the supply chain. You can't really be very efficient in the changes, unless the whole supply chain's changing, and it's very challenging to do because what is the incentive for all companies to change at the same time? So systemic innovations are very difficult in industries like construction. In addition, the way that our clients typically are procuring the services is low bid. They are dividing the processes into small pieces and buying the lowest bid for every piece, not seeing really how much friction and problems they are creating in the interfaces between those different phases. So this means that in-fact we are having a situation where everybody has to sub-optimise their work. They have to minimise their own workload to be able to survive with this structure that we have, and this is then leading to the situation that if the total cost of the buildings are higher than they should be, so we are not optimising the buildings, we are just minimising the work at different stages. It's really something that quite often I'm using the comparison that, if someone is building a football team. Nobody thinks that they can build a successful team by finding the cheapest players in every place. Why would we think that our industry is different. How can you expect that the lowest input is producing the best outcome? That is something that is a big mystery to me, that how people think that way. And of course also one of the things when we think about the BIM and its uses, it's a method which is bringing quite a lot of benefits downstream. We are producing information which is more usable and more accurate, but what is the incentive for the dishonest to do that? If we don't change the business models, why would you take more responsibility of the information producing, more information, more accurate information, unless you get some business benefits from that? This has created a business environment where it is quite crucial that our industry gets a wake-up call. Somebody has to, and from both the situations starts, that this is changing. And typically what is happening around the world is, that usually they, the wake-up call, is coming from the public homes. In 2007 both GSA and the United States, and Senate Properties in Finland, started to require BIM is a very different way, because they were looking at that from their business view-point. GSA started from the Spatial Programme Validation because their problem was that the buildings were often were bigger than the actual program, and which meant they were more expensive and they didn't have the money to build them. Then they have been expanding later on to the other issues like energy performance, operations and circulation and security, so now properties started to look at more the bigger picture of the process, so that they made the modelling mandatory for the whole process, for the whole design process at the first stage. But last year actually, Senate Properties' guidelines were transferred into the national requirements in Finland, and now they are covering the whole life-cycle of the informations, starting from the requirements until the user maintenance of the buildings. The only part of this at the moment missing is the building permit enclosures but that's also under preparations. And as you can see there are also other organisations like US Army Corps of Engineers, Coast Guard, Danish Enterprise and Construction Authority, and then Statsbygg in Norway that are adopting this thing. Then, what is happening at the moment in the UK, where I'm working at the moment? It's quite an interesting change that has happened there. I started almost exactly 3 years ago in the beginning of May 2010, and when at that time I started the preparation of our masters program BIM-Integrated Design. Many of my colleagues in Salford, but also in the industry and other universities were commenting something like this that, the industry needs people who can make drawings, nobody is using BIM and industry's not interested in that, and so we can't start teaching. It's too expensive, too complicated, which of course was quite challenging, but never-the-less we were able to continue the development, and luckily so because then in October 2010, Paul Morrell made this very famous statement that, in a conference in London, he said that government will start demanding BIM. And it was really government. Paul Morrell is the chief construction advisor for the UK government, and he made it very clear that this is going to happen, not exactly "when" at that point, but a statement. What happened then next, was of course, the typical reaction from the industry. This is ten days later and on the same website, an architect saying that, basically that, "Mr Morrell, you do your job. I'm doing my job, and as a designer I decide when I'm starting to use BIM and how." It's a quite interesting attitude that you are telling your customer that they can't tell you what they want. It's really strange when you start thinking about what this means. But what was very unique, what I've never seen, not in Nordic countries or in USA that, immediately, all the big industry associations started to be on-board. I don't know what is the real reason, but I suspect that the reason is that the construction industry is in a very bad shape in the UK, and public construction is a very big part of that, and the associations saw that this is a life-line. This is a way to stay in the game and the ownership of it, and very actively they started to participate. There are a huge amount of different work groups defining the details of this governmental program, for Morrell has later on said that, said about this that, when he made his statement, it was a bit like when Kennedy was saying in the early 60s that, we were going in the moon by 1970. That, like Kennedy, he didn't know how to do that. It was just that he wanted to make it clear to the industry that this is going to happen. Then in May 2011, the government was publishing their construction strategy. It is not only BIM's strategy, it's wider than that. But as a part of that, as you can see government will require fully collaborative 3D BIM with all project and asset information, documentation and data being electronic as a minimum by 2016. So now there is a clear timeline when industry has to be there, so all public projects will be there. As a consequence of this, the change in UK is something that I've never seen anywhere else. It was so rapid. In 2 years, my own estimation was that UK was somewhere between Italy and France, and when speaking about the maturity of the industry using BIM, and now it's number 2 in Europe after Finland, and in Finland people have been using this technology for a long time, so it's really quite amazing to see the big country like UK is changing so rapidly. And also now, Francis Maude, the minister, from the cabinet office is saying that UK is becoming the world leader of BIM. They see this as a tool to increase their competitiveness on the world market. And from David Philip who is the person responsible of the practical implementation of this program, this is one of his lines, where he is saying that "BIM has woken the industry up". Personally I would say that it's really the UK government which has woken the industry up. So it's really has been very very strong message to the industry. Good question of course is that, why? Why is the government saying something about the technology how that you should designing and delivering the buildings? What is the reason that you go on that level? And there are a couple of reasons. First is money. These are now Paul Morrell's slides that I am using, and the first reason is really the cost of construction. The other one is sustainability. So the government is feeling, that they are, in a way, between the cash and the carbon. They have to do something, and the question is that, what? What should we do so that the construction industry will start delivering the low-carbon future, for their society? And then, we don't have the money, we have to think. It's also quite different compared to many other countries is that the government is not putting much money into this development. They are really urging the industry to come on-board and start developing, so they just tell where they want to go and they expect that the industry will be responding to that. And of course then, when thinking about this challenge of the low carbon, the first question is that is the industry fit for purpose? And as we know, it's not very good. Our industry is not very good at changing as I said earlier, and one of the things is really the fragmentation. This is just listing some of the organisations in UK. And when getting everybody on-board is quite a problem of selling the ideas to the industry in that you really get to accept things of different associations. Then of course we all know in our industry, one of the big problems are the silos. We are really looking at our own professions and our own companies, and really this holistic thinking is missing from our industry. Another problem is that we are organising projects so that we are distributing the risk lower in the supply chain, and this means that it's very difficult for the small companies who are the suppliers. They finally are carrying the biggest risks and they are the least capable people to do that. And then we are very bad at carrying the information through. So we can't really, when we are moving from different phases of the project, it always, the information is disappeared. And this is really something that we should be able to change. And so the question is that how can we really persuade our industry to change? What is the carrot that is good enough for that? In a way I think that in the UK it's actually a, I would say that combination of carrot and stick. On the other hand the carrot is, "ok if you can do this you will have work in future", and on the other hand the stick is that "if you can't, you will be out of the business in the public sector". And what Paul Morrell has been listing there is that we need innovation. Personally I absolutely agree with that because our industry is very good at re-inventing things, but very bad at innovation. Real innovation doesn't happen often in the construction industry. Another thing is that we have to really get integrated, and then collaboration. And these are things that really are leading to the situation that if you want to achieve this you have to start using different methods and basically it's BIM. When we look at the cost implications, this, from McGraw Hill, SmartMarket Report, this is very clearly shown how much the collaboration can start reducing the costs, and this should be something that the owners should really see that this is a big issue. That when you move from the traditional 2D projects into the collaborative BIM you are cutting the change orders very dramatically. When we think about the typical profit margins of our industry, this is really a very big change. And when you can expect that you can save something like 15% of the project costs, why are the owners not more interested in this in our world? There are very few owners still pushing this. And then, from that, government came to this hypothesis that, as a client, government can derive significant improvements in cost value and carbon performance by using this open shareable asset information, meaning BIM. And then there are these different aspects of that that they've been emphasising. How the work has been now developed is that the first step was in ways of starting to map that into the current way of working, plan of works. Looking at what the government is calling, the data drops, meaning what information should be delivered at the different stages of the process. First of course for the decision-making purposes, and then at the end of the process, it's really the asset management information that is needed. And at the moment there are several pilot projects ongoing, testing the requirements, refining the requirements. So at the moment it's still a concept, and of course it's interesting to see how well the whole industry will be moving. To me it is clear that there will be a lot of companies who are going to be on the stage that they can deliver this by 2016, but I doubt that the whole industry can do it. There are an education and framing work group of government was calculating that we should re-educate 150,000 companies, 3 million people, to get the whole industry on-board. My question is that who is going to educate the educators for that? Because even if all the universities in the UK would start doing it, you don't have the capacity to do it. Just a fraction of the people can educate. So it's a big challenge but on the other hand of course also an opportunity. Then the work is going into more and more detail, really looking at what is the content in different data drops, and there were quite a lot of good ideas in that, and personally I like, for example, this one that really concentrated on what you really need, not asking everything. This was actually something that today in one meeting that we were discussing about that, typically, when you go to the facility management people, tell them about the possibilities of BIM, and ask what information you want to have, the answer is everything. But what is everything? What is all the information that you have from the building. You really have to define what you really use in your processes, and this is something that is ongoing at the moment in UK. So when going back to the sustainability issue, the government has seen that there is a connection, but then what is really the connection? How strong a connection do we have with BIM and sustainability? I think that the first thing there is that, when we really start calculating and evaluating the alternative designs in their early, early stages, it's almost impossible to ask manually. There are so many different aspects, so many complicated issues, that trying to do it manually is not a very reliable way, and even if you can do it, it's taking a huge amount of time to do that. So it's really something that we have to find tools to do that, and that is something where BIM provides the tools. So we can, when we get the design information in the BIM format, we can use that in different tools for different assessments and simulations and this picture is from Vladimir Bazjanac from Lawrence Berkeley, and when you think about the traditional way to use the simulation tools, they focus to build the model for the simulation and then you have very little capacity to do the actual simulations. Especially because you have to then, if you want to modify that easily, you have to then build several models and it's a really big effort compared to the situation where you just make a small set up from the existing models and use them in different tools, or you look at different alternatives. It's also possible in the BIM environment that you can really track or focus estimation, you just map different wall types or different windows to different production methods or different products, and you get alternative costs. The same way that sustainability you can look at, if I change these windows to that type, what is that, without changing the actual model, just changing the mapping of the products to the different things. So this is really a huge possibility and that is that we can start using the tools that we have. We have had a lot of simulation tools for a long time, but they have not been used in most projects, and this is now something that I see changing. In-fact, last summer in Finland the energy regulations changed so that if you have a cooling system in the building, you have to do a dynamic simulation of the building. That's the only allowed way to get the building permit. And even though you might be thinking that it's a very unusual situation in Finland, because of the cold climate, but it's not. Most of the modern office buildings need cooling, except on the coldest day of the winter, which are very few. So almost all new office buildings do have their air-conditioning systems. And I said that it's not only about buildings. We do have quite a lot of databases that you can start combining, and one of the discussions I had once with Martin Fischer, when we were flying to one conference in the same plane, that we were discussing about this idea of BIM, and we were developing a slogan that "embed as little as possible and link as much as possible". Because when you have basically just identifiers in the models, and you link them with the different databases, you can utilise those databases very efficiently, so it's a very flexible environment when you are not embedding all the details into the models but the really usable. As said for example, the wall types and products and methods in the database and link that to different walls in the building, rather than modeling all the material layers that we have in there. And this is giving us the possibilities to really look at the issues on the larger scale. Really the environment, transportation, land development, the city scale, looking at the traffic, not on the individual buildings. This is, to me, this is one of the really cool sort of things in BIM, starting to really combine that with GIS information, not just looking at the individual buildings. And of course, when you think about the building of the railroads or the roads, this is then of course, these databases are really, really crucial in that work. But it's also when we think about the building design. This is from Granlund which was my previous employer. I was actually responsible of this integration platform. The basic idea there is that the company doesn't develop these tools, but tries to find the best agents that you have around the world for the simulation, and then just building the missing links so that it's an integrated platform for the designers. But this also is showing that how complex the world starts to be. In that company there is no single person that could use all the tools, and of course you are not using all the tools in all projects. For example if computational fluid dynamics is something that you don't need in simple buildings, but when you have something complex like a concert hall, some big sport arena which is used for multiple purposes, it can be really, really important to have that simulations as well. But the possibility to use these tools is giving us the possibility to make a virtual building. Test a building before we build that. And in that company the idea has been developing so that you really start from the client requirements, which is to read them, to changing them into the actual technical requirements. All is fed into this central database. You have the model either from the architect, or the company is building that themselves, so they have built a system where they have standardised their workflows. They use all those models. Then you check that you have all the information that you need to make the zoning, start making thermal and comfort simulations. Of course it's important not just to try to save energy, we have to also create the conditions that people are comfortable in the building. Because otherwise, well, you wouldn't put any heating, or any air-conditioning system, no lighting. You wouldn't use any energy, but the end users would not be very happy, probably, with that. But the basic idea is that you really first, you calculate what is needed, and only after that you start the system design. And the system design is done using tools that are really calculating what the duct size is, what the air pressure loss is, sounds levels and so forth. So the designer's just basically looking at the rules where you want to have the ducts and where you put the different equipment. And as a consequence, because this is based on real product information, you really get the process management information database. And then you can start serving your customer also in the maintenance of this. And this has changed the business model of that company. They are not just traditional building services and designers, they are life-cycle information managers, who are managing the technical systems of their clients and reporting how well they are meeting the requirements. And then of course you can go further, like Martin Fischer in his keynote in the CRB work congress, told on Monday, that when you have this kind of traditional way of looking at alternatives, you can never be sure that this is really the best performance that you can achieve. It might be good, but there might be something that would be even better, but you can't be sure unless you really start doing the things in different ways. So he has been developing the "Stanford System". One of the PhD students has been developing a system where you start automating the calculations of alternatives, so it's automatically creating different alternatives, and calculating, trying to find the best solution. So optimising that in this case, it's really looking at the CO2 levels and costs, and then as an end result, you will get a map of the different alternatives. And as we can see there are some alternatives that are performing better than the ones that they manually were implementing. This is, I believe that this is, definitely the direction where we are moving to in the future, but what makes it complicated is that it's usually not just two things that we have to optimise. The optimisation of the whole building is very complicated issue. Because we have to, it's not just thinking about what is the bestest design and construction alternative. We have to also start thinking about the functions in the building. This is an area where I see a huge amount of need for research. Really optimising the building for the functions. In some cases like airports we can do that already. On some level we can really start looking at the flow of people, how efficient the building that we are designing will be for the purpose. But if we are speaking about office buildings we are not at all there yet. There are some first research that try to start looking at people's behaviour and really how well that building is serving that purpose, but that's where the big value is. These numbers are coming from one UK study that was looking at the lift construction costs. This one design is typically, something like 10% of that in 20 years time-frame, operations and maintenance is something like 3 to 5. And then the business value in the building is something like 40 to 200. And if you can improve this by better building design, that is really something where we are creating the added value for our customers. And this makes it complicated. We really have to consider very many things when we speak about optimising the buildings. Otherwise, it's again sub-optimising. We are optimising only some features of that. I have been speaking about some of things that we have now, but of course the question is that how far we are now. Are we there? I think the first question is to really ask that, we do have these tools but, do the designers really use the tools? So are we including the sustainability analysis in our projects, in our standard work-flow? Are we using the tools so early that we can still make changes in that or are we just simulating the building before we build it so that we verify what is there but too late to make major changes. And are we sure the typical designers know how to use these tools correctly? Then do the clients really make their decision based on that information, which is coming there, or are they still just buying the cheapest building they can have, not really looking at what is the environmental impact of that, or what is the life-cycle cost of that building? And then of course , a very important question is that, if we predict the performance of the building, are they really behaving the way as we have expected? My personal view is that the answer to all of these questions is "no". In most cases we do not do this. If there are few very good companies, very good projects that have been doing this, but in general, in our industry, we are not doing it as in my opinion we should. And one example of that that there has been lately, quite a lot of criticism is LEED. A lot of LEED buildings in the United States are behaving much worse than what has been the promise. In-fact, as you can see, the average LEED buildings are using more energy than comparable Non-LEED buildings. It's quite an astonishing result, but it's true. Why that happens, there can be different reasons. It might be that the people don't use the buildings in the right way. Might be that the systems have been not built as designed, or not configurated as they should have been. Might be that the simulation software is working wrong. Might be that the person doing the simulation has not been able to use the tools. It's difficult to say what is exactly the reason but never-the-less the situation is so that there are far too many examples where the buildings are not behaving the way that we have been promised. And of course one thing that we have to do is we have to start also following what happens. Really measuring how the building is really behaving and then optimising the systems in the real use of the building. This example is Senate Properties' own headquarters where they were able to decrease their energy consumption by 30% in 4 years, just by following and fine-tuning the systems in the buildings, so quite significant savings in that. Then my, basically, last question is that, ok is this important for your business or your future? And I want to use a classical example of what can happen if you ignore the change in the market place. Kodak was the company inventing the digital camera in 1975, as you can see. But the management didn't want to develop that, because they saw that if that can be developed, it would be killing the film, which was their "golden goose". So they just kind of buried that down. And then in, lets say 1990s, when the digital camera started to come to the marketplace, it was too late for them. They were not able to change, and as you can see, their profit was dropping really dramatically. In 1988, it was still a very profitable company. In 2009, it was really making huge losses, and last year it made a bankruptcy. So Kodak has been all that, it doesn't exist as a company any more on the consumer market. So this is, I think that this is a very good example of that what will happen. And personally my feeling is that BIM is a similar type of transition that, those companies who do not move in that, they will lose their market. It's not necessarily happening as fast as this moving from film to digital happened, but it will happen anyway. So the future is something that, if construction companies/designers want to stay on the marketplace, they have to consider what is happening there. And this is of course something which is also very important challenge for the educational institutions, that we have to be able to educate the people for the future. And it's not the same world where we were educated in our past. So my last slide, one of my favourites, is this. This Japanese poet that, "Vision without action is a daydream, and action without vision is a nightmare". Implementing DIM without understanding what you want to achieve by that can lead into very bad results in the companies. So really DIM is a tool, it's not a goal, and you have to define what are the goals that you want to achieve by the use of the tools before starting using that. Thank you.