Trimble’s technology transforming the way of working

Collaboration is widely understood as a necessity to successfully manage the ever-increasing complexity and demands of construction. Despite the importance of planning processes and their results, cooperation and planning coordination have received surprisingly little attention among industry experts and academic researchers. Many long-standing problems in the construction sector are, directly or indirectly, related to low-quality designs, poorly working design processes, and immature design management practices. Design phase collaboration challenges are often reflected on the construction site, where collaboration and coordination between stakeholders are even more disorganized than in the design phase.

Recent and continuous digital technological development opens the possibility of solving or at least improving the inefficient cooperation and communication between different players in the field. Design coordination and collaboration, in general, could be transformed from reactive to proactive actions when the digital working environment supports real-time information sharing and communication.

Trimble’s main goal in the LiveCol project is to research, develop, and validate novel technologies, methods and tools to empower the rapid collaboration of design and construction teams. Trimble’s role in the project is very much in technology and the development of the next-generation platforms and tools. Since cooperation basically consists of information sharing and communication, we focus on both real-time 3D data sharing and fast adaptive communication in virtual 3D environments.

The aim is to create a basis for the coordination of different design areas and functions using the gradual and controlled real-time sharing of 3D design and requirements data. Communication tools linked dynamically with the BIM context could connect the necessary parties to the communication chains and data streams automatically. Adaptive real-time data-sharing technology together with real-time adaptive communication technology is planned to work as a platform enabling a systemic change in construction industry collaboration.

The new collaboration technologies and methods will be evaluated in several relevant LiveCol use cases to recognize the most valuable solutions. The target is to test methods in currently existing coordination and co-design use cases but also in new raising topics, especially related to sustainability requirements in construction. Federated data management is also a key principle in the research and development plans. Also, Metaverse and other evolving virtual 3D collaboration technologies improving the communication experience will be evaluated during the project.

As we all have experienced, the adoption of digital technology will inevitably change the way people and organizations operate. Thus work patterns and workflows in the construction industry will also change. The current slow process consisting of successive steps is not suitable for workflows based on rapid information sharing. Rapid decentralized decision-making based on information requires a completely new level of cooperation between the process parties. Business Finland’s co-innovation project provides a great environment to find and define the right pathways to new data-driven collaboration together with research and industrial partners. How the value provided by the new collaboration technologies should be measured out in practice?

The main outcome of LiveCol is expected to be improved collaboration between construction project stakeholders, resulting in improved performance of the design and construction process with up-to-date and valid information which reduces wrong assumptions and non-value-adding activities. Once the transformation has started it most obviously is not restricted to only design collaboration but will become a current practice in the whole construction workflow value chain. The up-to-date, coordinated, and correct information directly improves efficiency and reduces waste in logistics and construction operations providing added value to the client. Turning the thinking model from reactive coordination to proactive planning will gradually reflect industry transformation toward industrial construction.

Jukka Suomi, Digital Construction Manager, Trimble

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