After the Grenfell Tower Fire of 2017, construction companies have had to adhere to the 2022 Building Safety Act. David Varela, senior client partner, Enterprise Real Time 3D, Unity, explores how digital twin technology can help contractors navigate regulations
UK construction contractors have had to come to grips with increased scrutiny from the 2022 Building Safety Act, a response to the Grenfell Tower fire of 2017.
The Act aims to create lasting positive change in the construction and maintenance of higher-risk residential buildings. It affects developers, owners, managers and occupiers, putting new obligations on the design, building, and upkeep of affected buildings.
Grenfell served as a wake-up call for building safety
The Act offers residents and homeowners more ‘rights, powers, and protections’ to make homes safer. It puts an obligation on building managers to collect and manage building and safety data.
Such data collection and management tasks, part of the ‘golden thread’, would be challenging to manage with traditional industry methods.
However, Digital Twin (DT) technology can help contractors navigate these new, rigorous, and evolving regulations. These twins are digital copies of real-world assets. They replicate and predict the behaviour and performance of real assets, digitally.
Contractors, and other parties, can use these to show the past, and present, and predict the future of assets under simulated conditions.
This technology is revolutionising how physical assets are designed, built, sold, operated and maintained, and can now transform how contractors comply with regulatory requirements.
It offers a lifeline to those concerned about managing the evidentiary aspects of their obligations.
Digital twin technology helps contractors adhere to safety regulations
It offers differing use cases depending on the readiness level of the contractor. ‘Readiness’ is measured as a function of whether contractors can use virtual, connected, predictive, prescriptive, and autonomous twins.
Virtual Twins
Virtual twins are mostly used at the design stage. Regulations can be input as design constraints for products and/or operations performed by the contractor.
Interactive and collaborative visualisations of the digital twin support collaboration between contracting companies, ensuring stakeholders are compliant from the start.
Predictive Twins
By adding a layer of simulation to the design, contractors can test scenarios to ensure the compliance of their products and/or operations. This is known as a predictive twin. This model can be used for training and rehearsing operations in ‘safe’ environments before construction.
Connected Twins
Connected twins offer continuous monitoring of the construction and operation of the building to show adherence to regulations. Networks of sensors offer a live view of the building status. This allows contractors and operators to ‘travel in time’ to analyse events.
Prescriptive Twins
The combination of simulated and connected twins enables prescriptive twins. These are used to predict and to advise operators when non-compliance might occur, or when systems will operate outside the safety window.
This is extremely important for planning and performing maintenance before non-compliance or a hazard occurs.
Autonomous Twins
Autonomous twins take prescriptive twins higher. These autonomously run the operations of a building with minimal or no human intervention.
It ensures the right operations and actuations are made to comply with building safety at all times. If regulations change, these can be input as a ‘constraint’, and the building can assess whether it remains compliant, or under which conditions it does not.
The benefits of digital twin technology
- DT allows the identification, understanding, management, and mitigation of building safety risks. Its use will, as per the government’s language, ‘prevent or reduce the severity of the consequences of fire spread or structural collapse throughout the life cycle of a building’.
- DTs are extremely powerful as a single source of truth for the building, and enable better design, operations, and compliance, with benefits for time and cost across the planning, budgeting, design, and construction of projects.
- DT use cases help contractors meet regulations throughout the life of the building.
- Different levels of DT maturity will enable different use cases for differing contractors and building operators.
Driving informed decision-making across the AECO industry
The technology drives informed decision-making across the architecture, engineering, construction and owner-operated lifecycle through insight, analysis, simulation and prediction.
It supports all parties in showing compliance and providing evidence throughout design, construction, and refurbishment.
Overall, the technology offers smarter resource management, stakeholder communication and information sharing, planning and decision making, progress monitoring and documentation, and faster and more accurate predictions and project and material estimates, along with site safety benefits.
DT technology is used across the architecture, engineering and construction sectors – from automotive to manufacturing and even with smart cities and disaster management.
It’s a versatile technology that allows contractors to connect and comply, staying current and safe with their obligations, and delivering superior results.
