One year after the nation’s leading construction and infrastructure companies united to establish the Next Coalition to promote and share industry best practices, the coalition has completed its Construction Safety Challenge and is again calling for innovators to tackle a new competition.
The “Digital Twin Challenge” calls for companies, startups and other innovators in the technology community to submit solutions that will enhance the “digital twin” approach. A digital twin is a virtual representation of a physical facility in the form of a three-dimensional model that contains evolving, dynamically-updated data on the state of the facility. Last year’s challenge focused on construction safety.
The solution could enhance the digital twin approach in: geometry — reality-capture solutions that allow updating the digital twin to reflect the latest look of a facility; data — physical sensors and other Internet of Things (IoT) devices that supply a continuous stream of data on objects and environments of a facility and platform — where both the geometry and sensor data combine to offer near real-time insights on the current state of a facility.
Such applications should apply to the construction phase and carry on for delivery to the owner for use in the operations and maintenance phase.
“With the rise of smart buildings and the Internet of Things, we are going to see an exponential increase in the number of connected devices and systems,” said Tim Gaylord, east coast innovation leader, DPR Construction. “This real-time data collection and insight will present countless possibilities for improving the way we deliver buildings.”
The coalition also has welcomed Shawmut Design and Construction and HITT Contracting to its growing membership, joining Black & Veatch, DPR Construction, Haskell, McCarthy Building Companies, Swinerton and Truebeck Construction in leveraging their expertise and best practices to identify and advance processes and technologies most likely to advance the industry.
