Balfour Beatty partners with Higher Education Institutions to develop innovative Building Information Modelling solution

Balfour Beatty has partnered with Leeds Beckett University, White Frog Publishing and Coventry University to create a new, automated solution to tackle challenges faced by the construction industry in adopting Building Information Modelling (BIM) technology.

BIM is an intelligent 3D model-based process that provides insight and tools to more efficiently plan, design, construct and manage buildings and infrastructure.

Whilst the benefits to embedding BIM into everyday working practices are clear, the industry hasn’t embraced the technology in a way similar to other technologies such as drones, due to a lack of access to the level of design information required at an early stage to effectively use the tool. [1]

The project will see the collaborative team explore how BIM can become more automated by developing a plug-in software solution, with the aim of assisting users in complying with BIM standards and meeting Government targets[2] by adopting BIM as part of the Construction 2025 Strategy to reduce time and cost of construction.

The project is part of a wider £12.5 million investment programme organised by the UK’s innovation agency, Innovate UK, a non-departmental public body within UK Research and Innovation, and financed by the Government’s Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund in innovative projects aiming to improve productivity, quality and performance of the UK construction sector.

The developed software will automatically populate the 3D representation of products or elements with the appropriate building information. This will simplify the process of sharing data between design, procurement, maintenance and operation teams, allowing for increased predictability of building performance through more detailed asset planning.

Rachel Sudlow, Project Lead and Continuous Improvement Project Manager at Balfour Beatty, said: “As an industry leader in the development and integration of BIM, the new automated software tool is yet another step forward in driving change and allowing the industry to fully realise and enjoy the benefits of BIM across complex infrastructure and building schemes.”

“Balfour Beatty has been using BIM for the last decade; drawing on our expertise and application of digital technologies, we’re proud to be collaborating with our partners to develop a solution which will benefit the industry as a whole, both clients and contractors alike.”  

Dr Saheed Ajayi, Senior Lecturer in the School of Built Environment and Engineering at Leeds Beckett, and the Academic Leader of the project, said: “The challenges companies are facing include: the learning curve embracing the new technology and getting everyone involved to use it; the need to comply with set standards and codes of practice; and the need for sufficient information about the building to accompany its 3D representation.

“Companies do not know what format the information should be in and how much information to include – there is currently no standardization. Through the research and innovation with Balfour Beatty, we are pleased to present this solution to the industry”

The research team will develop the automated BIM solution over a two year period, with the project to be shared with the wider industry in 2021.

A million new homes could be built on previously used land in England, with more than 2,600 new sites identified in the past year.

Additional brownfield sites with room for more than 18,000 new homes have been found in Barnet, north London, as well as sites with capacity for 19,000 homes in south Cambridgeshire, 3,000 in Sheffield and 4,600 in Bristol, according to research into public registers by the Campaign to Protect Rural England.

The government has said 300,000 new homes need to be built across the UK every year to keep up with demand, but delivery is running at the rate of just 180,000 a year, with opposition from local groups and campaigners to construction in the countryside remaining a significant block.

House builders often object to developing land previously used for factories or car parks because it can be expensive to bring back into use, compared with open fields. But the CPRE said that official registers showed that almost two-thirds of the available sites were classed as deliverable within five years.

The campaign group, whose president is the pottery designer Emma Bridgewater, said the brownfield figures and the discovery of capacity for around 120,000 new homes in the past year showed the government needs to adopt an unambiguous “brownfield first” policy.

“Building on brownfield presents a fantastic opportunity to simultaneously remove local eyesores and breathe new life into areas crying out for regeneration,” said Rebecca Pullinger, the CPRE’s planning campaigner.

The proportion of homes built on the green belt doubled from 2% to 4% of all new homes between 2016 and 2017, while the share built on brownfield land fell from 61% to 56%, according to government figures.

The government’s housing white paper last year demanded priority for suitable brownfield sites, but said building on green belt would be allowed if offset by improvements to environmental quality and access on remaining protected land.

The government has announced a plan to build up to 1m new homes in an arc between Oxford and Cambridge in the next 30 years, which has sparked concern in five affected counties, including Buckinghamshire, Northamptonshire and Bedfordshire. A Survation poll for the CPRE last week found three-quarters of residents believed it would cause damage to the countryside and environment.