AEC Production Control Rooms is a project partly funded by Innovate UK as part of the Transforming UK Constuction: Demonstrator projects funding competition.
The partners on the AEC Production Control Rooms project will build a scalable and repeatable 'plug-and-play' construction management and reporting platform that will be tested on three major infrastructure projects in the UK. This digital project management platform will be accessible via physical site-mounted 'AEC Production Control Rooms' that will display a suite of preconfigured performance metrics using real-time data, facilitating forward planning and collaborative decision making at team, project and portfolio level. A fourth HQ-mounted Master Control Room will enable benchmarking across different projects remotely.
At a physical location within the site office, touch-enabled projectors and multiple immersive displays will present comparable project metrics such as EIR and RFI coordination, health and safety data, evidence-based task management, business intelligence, and 4D planning.
This will eventually get deployed across the Department for Transport's (DfT's) project portfolio under the wider Living Lab initiative with partners Mace, Costain and Dragados, and clients HS2, Heathrow and Highways England, among others.
The aim of this project is better project control to improve the performance of construction in UK infrastructure through increased transparency and project benchmarking. Clients, planners, site managers and engineers will be able to track real time project performance and take action based on insights. These stakeholders will, for the first time, be able to objectively compare 'what was planned' versus 'what has been delivered'.
Critical project data will be made available to key stakeholders who can make better-informed decisions within the construction process early on.
The main areas of focus will be:
- Development and installation of three site-mounted physical Control Room demonstrators by SME partner MissionRoom;
- Installation of fourth physical master Control Room at DfT HQ in Whitehall;
- Novel open source data aggregation and filtering interface by Mace, Costain and SMEs; *Academic research establishing the industry business model transformation required. Plus RoI, impact and case studies for business exploitation upon completion by UCL and Imperial College.