Case Studies – European Union – B.R.I.C.C.
Objective
BRICC aimed to exploit emerging Integrated Broadband Communications (IBC) data, audio and image infrastructure. It was performing advanced application experiments with the aim of improving the long-term economic efficiency of the European construction industry in competing in the international marketplace.
The project was user-led and taked its direction from the fundamental requirements of the construction industry as they emerged during the course of the project. Specific industry goals included:
Better co-ordination of the design and construction process.
Improved communications of dispersed activities between project offices, design offices and multiple construction sites, resulting in rapid identification of risks and implementation of corrective action.
Avoidance of unnecessary travel between management and design offices and construction sites
The challenge
Technologies were selected and integrated rather than developed from scratch.
In the prototypes and pilots, technologies such as mobile multimedia workstations, remote video monitoring of site progress and interactive access to remote databases were being evaluated in both simulated and real working conditions.
Key Issues
The focus of the project has been the shared real time access to all management, planning, co-ordination and design information by all relevant professionals. Current systems supported the transfer of data to and from a central database. This was to be extended in four ways:
Integrated access to all relevant databases (project CAD data, suppliers CAD databases, building regulations, legal documents, related projects).
Use of multimedia hypertext techniques to provide an integrated user surface to construction information, past experience and training material.
Expansion of data communications speed and storage capacity by several orders of magnitude to capture the vast amount of unstructured data on large projects (CAD, images, video and audio records).
The economic and organisational impacts analysis of the use of such technologies on the Construction sector would have been a major focus of this project.
Expected Impact
The basic approach was to demonstrate the benefits of the IBC infrastructure over a range of scenarios that covered any stage, level and location within a construction project. Measurement of performance could have been made against present standards and extrapolated to cover all project activities. In this way opportunities for utilising IBC could have been determined and ranked according to an economic comparison based on cost and benefit analysis
Achievements
The main objectives of the research was to exploit the emerging integrated broadband communications (IBC) data, audio and image infrastructure. It was proposed to perform advanced application experiments with the aim of improving the long term economic efficiency of the European construction industry in competing in the international marketplace.
The research was user led and took its direction from the fundamental requirements of the construction industry as they emerged during the course of the research. Specific industry goals included:
better coordination of the design and construction process;
improved communications of dispersed activities between project offices, design offices and multiple construction sites, resulting in rapid identification of risks and implementation of corrective action;
avoidance of unnecessary travel between management and design offices and construction sites.
Key issues in the research centre around real time access to all management, planning, coordination and design information by all relevant professionals and included:
integrated access to all relevant databases;
use of multimedia hypertext techniques to provide an integrated user surface;
expansion of data communications speed and storage capacity by several orders of magnitude to capture the vast amount of unstructured data on large projects;
implementation of adequate security, confidentiality and privacy safeguards.
The research partners have been able to successfully exchange one category of construction project information between their databases.
British Insulated Calender’s Cables its subsidiary Balfour Beatty and British Telecom Laboratories have successfully establish links between different sites in the United Kingdom and have already demonstrated simultaneous voice, data, shared screen and video functions on 2 party conferences.