WATNEY MARKET SPECIAL WORKSHOP MEETING, 31-07-2025
GEORGE STEVENSON …is basically a BIM model of an old 1970s market. But the important thing for us with this is to work out how best to get the information that they actually need. So, it’s being driven by the fire engineering team, but we’re also working with the building safety team. And we want to use this to also engage with people that are involved in life cycle replacements, retrofit, decarbonisation. So, there’s a range of different things. (shares screen). This is the market, it’s in Tower Hamlets, and Barry is going to show you some detail on this. And what they need to do is look at this from a fire risk perspective. So, they’re going to be thinking of things like how are they going to get compartmentation information. And the things about fire risk assessments and things like that.
So, what we want to try and do as a group is work out the most effective and cost effective ways of being able to gather this information. That’s the boundary that we’re working to. That’s just what it looks like off Google Earth. And this is what it comprises. There’s four residential blocks on either side of the market. There’s plant rooms and things like that. There’s the market itself. There’s the shops, including stock rooms and service roads. Underground car parks. There’s also the whole district heating system which I think that’s going to be quite an important thing. Because district heating systems have now become part of, there’s new legislation involved. And there’s also some bungalows that we need to manage.
And initially we’ve already run a drone survey on it. That’s what it comprises. So, the purpose of this is to bring together people that maybe have got some expertise in this sort of thing. I’m talking about maybe fire engineering and doing inspections. Creating information on exiting buildings from a fire safety perspective, but also building safety, ventilation, because one of the big challenges that everybody has got at the moment is how they’re going to handle mould. So, these are the sorts of things that we want to do in a joined up way.
When the survey is done we want to make sure that we can capture as much as the information that’s needed going forward as possible, so it can be reused over the next 3-5 years as a baseline to work from. And being able to think of smart ways of doing that. This is going to go out to tender, probably September, October time. So, anything you can input at the moment, if you’re interested in, I know Steve Duffy I think would be interested in doing some of that, maybe Justin would as well. There’s a range of different opportunities here that we can talk about. The key thing is to make sure that the specification is right, which is what Barry’s doing.
The other thing that I was going to say is we as Active Plan have got a big asset type library which is already pre-populated with the information that’s needed from a residential perspective for housing. We’re going to be using that, that’s going to be part of the process to use 360s to create the asset data. So when we go out to tender, the process will be to tender for producing a geometric producing floor plans and that side of things. But then what we’re then going to do is open it up to people who are subject matter experts who can then look at the 360s that are going to be created. And then to be able to tag them with the right information.
BARRY BASSNETT (shares screen). This is really just to describe the project in a bit more detail. I think George has done a pretty good of describing the outline and things. But what we did with this is we flew it with a drone, a very early morning before the market was set up. So, what we’ve got in here, this is an open market. Underneath you can just about see there is a whole series of retail shops, all sorts of shops. It’s difficult to see underneath, but you’ve got those. And then on top of that we’ve got three floors of residential accommodation. We’ve also got some accommodation over here, these bungalows here are all linked to the central system, but they’re all part and parcel of the same block.
For which we’re going to have to do a whole series of surveys looking at fire systems and things like that, because this is the main driver. But what we’re also doing while we’re here is we’re trying to get a scope from Tower Hamlets so we can expand the scope, the level of detail that the BIM model needs to be in for different communities and different professional heads or different disciplines need to capture. The big issue with this from a point of view is underneath this edge of the bungalows pretty well, you can just see over here there’s a slip road here going to an underground car park. And in the underground car park is a whole series of spaces, rooms, where the market traders store all of their goods. So what you’ve got is like a perfect storm of fire risk.
You’ve got a car parking underneath, you’ve got retail storage, you’ve got residential on top. Now, we’ve a number of challenges with this. The first thing is just to figure out how we can get access to everywhere. Well, the public areas that’s fine, the retail places are fine. What we’re proposing to do as well is rather than scan every single residential property is just to do a few and get a schematic or a thing. Essentially, for want of a better word, copy and paste the room spaces. And in order to do that what we’re going to do is put out to tender laser scanner or Lidar scanning, to scan inside the building so we’ve got some drawings. Because currently we don’t really have anything we can overlay and we can map,
The next phase we’ll be doing 360 imagery so we can then start to populate everything that the Tower Hamlets Borough Council want to do. The priority is for fire systems, but this is going to be a sandbox for our group as well. So, we’re proposing that we use this as a tool that lots of people can contribute to or use for training, or just try different things out. Just to test concepts and to look at how we can do this. At the end, we’ve got to deliver something of course to Tower Hamlets, but we can purpose and layer this model in different ways to suit different people’s disciplines, what we call asset champions. So, you’re going to have people who are experts in fire systems, fire safety etc.
Other people who are associated with that, one of the interesting things we’re going to have to deal with is PPEs, or PEEPs, which is the personal evacuation plans for people who have some sort of disabilities. But at the same time, there’s all sorts of things that we can use 360 documentation for, for people who are not necessarily CAD users. We could give people a point cloud of this, but not many people would be able to use it apart from a CAD person who might use it to do that. We’ve already done, let’s give you a little bit of a tour. So, what we’ve got is these residential properties here, front and back, divide this way. We’ve got these bungalows, another level here. And this is all connected to the bungalows.
And you can actually see if you look through here there’s spaces that go into the big garages underneath. So, this is about the extent of the garage. This is also like a perfect storm of all of the difficulties that we’re likely to come across when we’re doing HRBs or any public housing building. So we thought this would be a great project for people to be able to collaborate to. What you can do, I can give you a link to this and you can all play about with it. If you want a link text ‘Barry’ in the chat and I’ll happily send you the link so that you can explore it yourself. We’re using this thing called Niro, we have another application called SORVO. And SORVO allows us to add all sorts of other information into it as well. But if you want a link for this just text ‘link’ and we’ll happily send that through to you and you can play around with it.
But the timeline is next week we’re having meetings with Tower Hamlets to come up with a specification for the BIM model. In other words, what level of detail are they going to need that BIM model created to. And then once we’ve done that we’ll be putting it out to tender to a number of survey companies who will be coming in and actually creating an overlay drawing, doing the scanning, so we’ve got a complete 3D internal survey as well as the external survey that we’ve got now.
GEORGE STEVENSON I think as well, Barry, once we’ve had the meeting with the various different users in the Council, we’ll be able to identify what additional information is needed that isn’t coming down to surveys per se. It might be fire engineering, it might be mould. There’s a whole range of things that I’m sure they’ll tell us that they need information on that we can then, rather than go to a single company that then manages it, maybe subcontracts it, it makes more sense for our community where we’ve got people that are experts in fire doors, for example, to come in and do that as a work package. And one of the biggest challenges that I see is identifying where all of the fire compartments are and what the walls are made of. Because that’s always something that’s difficult to achieve. Now, obviously we don’t want to boil the ocean in terms of doing intrusive inspections. But it’s also a matter of somebody that maybe is very experienced, maybe people from British Gypsum or Knauf, who understand how walls are made up, whether there’s a way that they can look back and say OK, this is 1970s build, what’s the likelihood of the wall construct? That might be something Justin, you as an architect, you might have a feel for. And we might be able to get some short cuts to be able to do things so that when somebody is going to site they’re actually going with a pretty good idea of what they’re going to find.
BARRY BASSNETT I think the other thing that we’re trying to do with this as well is we’re saying well, what’s in it for people. The idea really is to come up with an idea or best practice so that people can specify and figure out what they’ve got to do. What works and also what doesn’t because we will inevitably make mistakes on this. But the point about it is to do those and to fix them fast. But the idea really behind opening this project up, which is a commercial project, but it’s real. This isn’t some made up sandbox, this is a real application. And it gives people the opportunity to look and try things out. Best practice, how do you go about doing this?
And more importantly, how do you go about specifying this to your clients or your colleagues. So we can come up with, not a template, but this is the things that we need to think about. I’ll give you one example. One of the things, because we’re doing different surveys we’ve looking at using what’s called a single point target. So, if we’re using different data sets like drones or conventional surveying or 360 imagery, one of the things we will be doing on this survey is using common coordinated points. So at a later stage you can come back and you know exactly where you are in that building, in the market and the underground car park. So you can compare and look at things on a trend basis.
Essentially what we’re trying to do here is open this up as a best practice tool that people can collaborate with, or even if it’s just sat from the sidelines and getting an interest to what are the problems and challenges that we have in coming up with asset information management. Obviously there’s a different thing to do with new build and a different thing to do with brown field. New build, we’ve got lots of information from the BIM model and construction and as-builts and stuff like that that we can hand over. In this particular case, as with most of the buildings, there’s very little knowledge we can hand over, apart from anecdotal stuff.
GEORGE STEVENSON I think the thing is as well Barry, I was talking this morning to NavVis the camera people. And they’ve got a new technology, MLX I think it is, which is not the quite as expensive thing, but it’s not quite as accurate as the top one. But for this purpose it’s probably adequate. And the point I’m making is that there’s going to be a range of technologies that people will be able to use. Because as we’ve discussed, a lot of people at the moment are doing scan to BIM, but actually they’re not. They’re doing scan to 3D because a BIM model, at least in theory, should know what the walls are made of and what the doors are and all of the rest of it. And you don’t get that from a scan to BIM process.
Scan to BIM is very useful for certain purposes, but what we’re trying to do here is scan to asset. And I don’t know anybody that’s done that before, so I think we’re breaking new ground in doing this. And therefore we’ve got a combination of point cloud, Lidar and 360s. And the combination of those things, again with a robust asset database library, is that we can move towards that.
BARRY BASSNETT I think the other thing to add to that, because we’re going to be using probably 5 or 6 different technologies and stitching them together. But what we’ll be able to do as a head to head comparison on time, cost etc. So when you’re specifying things you can figure out well, what do I need. It may well be just 360 imagery is perfectly fine. But in the absence of drawings you may well have to commission Lidar or Slam or NavVis or whoever it might be to actually come in and do the drawings.
So, what we’re doing in this process as we go through is try to come up, not with an Excel spreadsheet, but some comparisons so you know what the pros and cons are. And what you need to specify from your data capture people. And it’s going to be different jobs. If you’re just doing it for fire survey, do you need to have a centimetre accuracy for your drawings? Probably not. But if I need to capture something fast and get that information into a format that I can share with other subject matter experts who haven’t got time to visit the site.
And you can pass that on and ask for advice, is there a more efficient way of doing that. I’ve got my own view, but I need to sanity check it. And that’s one of these things we’re going to be doing is reporting back and helping people decide which is the best practice. To inform the asset owners, when they specify we need doing this, sometimes they don’t know what they don’t know. And they don’t know what questions they should be asking of the supplier.
GEORGE STEVENSON I think the other thing, one of the challenges at the moment is the technology that’s coming through at the moment is stunning. There’s all sorts of new technology coming through. The challenge is that a lot of the companies that are buying and going out and offering that are not necessarily experienced geospatial people. So they’re actually buying something and they are probably relying on what they’re being told can be done. And they will go out quite correctly and sell that to a client, and then find that some of the things that they have been promised can’t be done.
A good example of that is being able to take a point cloud and then turn it into a BIM model. And there’s all sorts of people that are offering to do that, but actually in practice it’s very questionable as to whether it’s there yet. There’s still quite a lot of manual intervention needed to make that work. And Steve, you used to work for Leica, so I think you would confirm that there’s a lot of things that people may think are straightforward, but actually aren’t. So, one of the things that we’re going to be checking here is how fast we can get to what we need.
KIRSTY COGAN I’m from SFG20 which is the PPM maintenance standard. I suppose my question is, I appreciate a lot of this talk is about technology, I’m curious to know has any thought or is there an opportunity maybe being given to what comes out at the other end? We’re part of an industry alliance with NBS around Uniclass, GuideM, NRM3, so that we’re trying to map all of the standards across because we absolutely recognise sitting at the operational phase of the building life cycle that a lot of the information gets lost at handover from kind of construction into operation. And it would be great on these kind of pilot projects, now that we’ve done all of those mappings, if there was a way of showcasing how that bit of it can be used as well. Might there be an opportunity for that?
GEORGE STEVENSON Yeah, absolutely, we’re doing exactly that. I mean, we are one of your partners. Sorry we as in, I should have flagged this up. I’m chair of BIM In Asset Management, but my business is Active Plan, so we’re already doing a lot with SFG20. And also the whole point about being able to get the information out. What you’ve just said there is exactly what we are doing. I know that Andy Green and others are doing work around this area, so if you wanted to bring that into what we’re doing here, I don’t think it’s yet released, is it?
KIRSTY COGAN So, behind the scenes, we had a call of Friday with all of the representatives, we had Jo from CIBSE, we had Andy Green etc. So we have the data, we just haven’t publicly, we’re still signing it off. But we’ve already used it on some projects in the Middle East before, we have used it and we could do on this.
BARRY BASSNETT That’s exactly what we’re trying to do is, the difficulty most people have is they don’t know what they should be asking for. And let’s say something like Tower Hamlets, they may commission a survey, but they can get 40 different versions delivered to them and there’s no commonality between them. So, one of the key exercises for this to look at what we need to specify in any data capture and what standards will we want to use. Even within the same council people are getting things in different formats and that’s just mental.
What we need to have is an industry standard which will help with compliance and all sorts of things later on because it just makes common sense, but there’s nothing common about common sense, is there? But if you’ve got things like that we’ll have a conversation over the next few weeks to look at the framework of the data categorisation and the schemas that we can deploy when we’re looking at this. Because this really informs the level of detail that we do our 3D model to. As George rightly says, we’re not doing scan to BIM, we’re doing scan to there’s a wall and a shape, we don’t know what’s in that wall. We don't know what category of fire door is.
GEORGE STEVENSON The really important point Kirsty, is that we’re already doing a lot, we manage Sodexo\s database.
KIRSTY COGAN I know Jo said she’d already been quite involved and I said I’ll just kind of keep banging the same drum then.
GEORGE STEVENSON No, absolutely. The important thing is that we really understand how SFG20 connects to asset data. And one of the things that is important that I think a lot of people that aren’t doing that type of data engineering work. One of the challenges is that SFG20 will have maybe 2 or 3 different procedures for the same asset type, depending on what system it’s in or where it’s being used. So therefore this is a really good important project for this because what we’ve actually got is the opportunity to say not just that that’s a valve or a pump. We’re actually saying it’s a pump or a valve that is doing this thing. Which is what you need to know to assign the right SFG20 code.
And that’s one of the big challenges, in terms of what you’ve been doing to map Uniclass and SFG20 and NRM. I was involved in that probably 5 years ago when NBS were doing it and they asked us to help with that. The challenge is that you’re mapping classifications that have been put together for different purposes and there’s not a direct match in many cases, they need to be interrelated. So, what you’re doing is excellent, but what we now need to do, and I think that you’re quite right in saying that a project like this. And we’re doing another one tomorrow morning on data centres. So, what I’m saying is what we’re trying to do is identify a number of real jobs that have got some commercial potential for the people that get involved.
We can’t guarantee that because they’re going out to tender, but you can influence the scope of what we’re going out to tender for, which is normally something that’s valuable to people. And therefore we can also brief the procurement people as to what good looks like, so that they’re not going to just go hopefully for the lowest price.
JUSTIN GILLARD It was just to address something that came to mind when Kirsty said what she did about SFG20. And also Barry when he said within certain councils sometimes they have information in different formats. All I was going to say, I don’t know if this is something that’s already underway, but when George is saying, and part of George’s mission is to sort of capture the data sets that people need to ask for. I’ll just share my screen briefly. This is an example of an organisation which could effectively be a council and its exchange information requirement, it’s 36 pages long.
Basically what it is, is that organisation gets to say to everybody involved form the beginning before they do anything, here is our SFG requirement or equivalent. And this is for this data set that you’re delivering, these are the rules. And then if everybody has that as a requirement, so like a maintenance information requirement lets’ say, then you have a fixed protocol and basis under which, if everybody agrees to it, everybody works along with that protocol and somebody has to police it as well. George, is that useful as an idea? Or is it already underway in that way?
GEORGE STEVENSON Well, essentially what you showed there is the EIR. Underneath that there should be the AIR, the asset information requirements, which does exactly what you’ve just said. If it’s done properly then that should define how the information about the assets should be being delivered. And that’s something that Mo does as well. We do that as Active Plan, we’ve got an asset information requirements tool. And what we do is take what you’ve just shown there which is a document, and unfortunately people often don’t read documents.
JUSTIN GILLARD I often say this, that’s why you need information managers to police people along the way. I just thought I’d offer it as a way of capturing it. The SFG requirement could be in there.
STEVEN DUFFY There’s also the BIM execution plan requirement which is part of that as well, but from my experience it’s not really followed. And often on very large projects by the time you come to actually execute the project the EIR and the requirements in it are no longer valid. Because the industry has moved on and the actual requirements are changed, or the way that it’s been delivered has changed. So, it’s quite a hard thing to actually mandate because 5 years when the EIR is written at the very start of the project, to when it actually starts onsite, there’s a good amount of time passes.
BARRY BASSNETT I think it’s a really good point, Steven. But one of the interesting things, there are a number of statutory regulations coming in to place now. And in order to report and pass those and make them auditable and conform, this sort of taxonomy classification would make auditing much more simple. So, things like Regulation 38, but also there’s another thing coming up as well which is Martyn’s Law which we’ve probably got 2 years to prepare for. But that in the same thing is going to be a statutory responsibility and in order to do that there has to be an asset requirement.
So, these are not would like to do and wouldn’t it be good if, these are now you’ve got to do it. And it’s not just about facing a fine anymore, if you don’t do it and something happens then people go to jail. It’s not you can afford to pay that fine if we’re non-compliant. Things are changed in that way.
GEORGE STEVENSON You’re absolutely right with Martyn’s Law which is the security one. There’s one even more pressing and that’s Awaab’s Law. And that’s about mould and ventilation and absolutely critical from SFG20’s perspective. So yeah, I think we’ve got a lot of good stuff that we can bring together on this.
BARRY BASSNETT For me it’s sort of like a catalyst project. If you say to somebody come up with some good ideas and just give them a blank piece of paper, it’s very difficult. But if you’ve got something that you can focus on and go ooh, I can see why and do that. It helps people be more creative and innovative. And the idea really about this is to come up with a best practice that this community can share. And inform our clients and inform our colleagues as to what we might be able to use.
So, from my part I’m going to be helping bring the data together. But if anybody wants to come up with any ideas or any requirements or on a wish list. If you’ve got a wish that you would like this model, this information data pack, portal, whatever we have to include that you would find useful, please let us know. Because it might be something very simple, but could be worth a fortune to people.
JUSTIN GILLARD Can I just tie a couple of things together. What you said, Steven, about projects potentially being 5 years long, EIR not being implemented by the right people and by the time you get to the end. So, a big part of what George is heading up here, all of us really, is to raise what I call competency. So, people’s involvement and understanding of what’s going on, it’s part of their daily awareness. As Barry said it’s becoming or it’s already in legislation. But `I’m finding on projects that I’m not the building owner is engaging more permanent staff that through meetings are just rejecting information straight away, it’s happened to me.
I created a project file, there was two conflicting pieces of protocol information. I gave to four digits, they rejected it, they said it’s five digits. So, even I got caught out. But a good thing is they’re managing it. So, I think the culture is changing.
GEORGE STEVENSON Just building on that, we’re on a large project at the moment, Jo Harris is involved in that actually Kirsty. Where it was started probably four years ago and we’re now reading the data because we’ve got tools that automatically check to see if the data that’s being provided is right. It keeps picking up that they’ve used the wrong Uniclass codes. Now, they haven’t used the wrong Uniclass codes, they’ve used the Uniclass codes that were defined three years ago. And the problem, I say the problem it’s not a problem, it’s Uniclass NBS update their Uniclass codes probably four times a year.
KIRSTY COGAN And they did reuse them as well, that’s stopped now thankfully.
GEORGE STEVENSON That wasn’t so helpful, was it? Where they actually used the same code for a different asset, or different product. I think the thing is that people are now becoming a bit more aware, as Justin is saying there, that the data is actually important. Because up until now people haven’t really been doing too much with the data. In the data engineering one that we ran earlier, we showed how for example the coordinates of things from different files actually mean that the asset information, the location of assets, is way out. And it’s simply because of the way the data was generated from the models.
Because people haven’t understood, the model looks fine, from a 3D modelling perspective, clash detection and all of the rest of it. But when you then get the data export the locations of things are in the wrong place. And therefore they need to be post corrected. It’s arguable you should say perhaps the original authors should have got it right first time, but because nobody has ever checked before they didn’t know that the information was coming out. And remember a BIM model is generally, there’s no such thing as a BIM model on a decent sized project, They’ll be 15, 30, 30 BIM models, all of which are being federated. And therefore all of that needs to be coordinated. So, part of the thing that excites me about this project is that we’re doing something at a ground level that’s really important.
I was down with Barry, we went to Watney Market and the market traders that were setting up, the residents were asking us what we were doing. And they’re really engaged because this is their home, it’s their workplace. And if we can do something to help make those safer I think that’s really good. I learned one particular thing is that seagulls don’t like drones. As the drones were flying around, the seagulls were attacking it.
BARRY BASSNETT But I think it’s a valid point, one of the critical things that most councils want to look at as well. We’re talking in a very abstract form about Uniclass and this and that. What came out of the Grenfell enquiry is engagement with the community, engagement with the residents. And that’s one of the things that we want to try and do here, open this model up to the residents so that they can look at it as well. Within certain limits of course, obviously you don’t want to give them information that they can’t use.
But I think this is a job that allows us to play and try and experiment and use as a reference for other people. As far as I can see it’s like there’s no specification that comes out from a housing association to a survey company to say we need you to do this to this accuracy, and we need you to deliver it in this. There’s nothing like that out there,, it’s mostly BIM level modelling which is completely inappropriate to this because as George says it’s not a BIIM model.
STEVEN DUFFY So it should be flipped n its head, in my view. It should be fully based around what do they want. If they’re informed enough to know what they want and know what the levels are then that would dictate everything else.
GEORGE STEVENSON That’s the point Justin was making.
BARRY BASSNETT That’s exactly the point. And that’s why we’re spending a fair of time talking with lots of different departments to figure out what information would they like. Whether it’s decor, whether it’s the boiler system that’s in the house, when it’s due for replacement. These are all things that are really important in asset management because what you’re looking at is safety, of course. But also it’s how much is it going to cost to replace the boilers in there? And do they have to replace the windows to make them more energy efficient etc.? So, if we do this it’s just like in this case we can produce an asset information register which will help them predict.
I like life cycle, but it’s mostly death watch. How long is this thing going to last before we have to replace it? How long can we prolong the asset’s life before we have to knock it down and build another one? That’s the key information that councils need.
GEORGE STEVENSON So, if you know people who are considering doing this. If you know people that are commissioning surveys and commissioning asset capture, then try and plug them in to what we’re doing here. Because we certainly would be interested in sharing with them what we’re coming acorns. And we’d like them to share with us what they’re doing as well. And it may well be that there’s things that we’re doing they could actually use and implement. We end up upgrading the industry because we’re then enabling some of the really good large firms that are doing asset surveys. But their normal way of doing asset surveys is sending people to site and the boots on the ground surveys, whereas this approach is fundamentally different.
BARRY BASSNETT There are things that we would like to do over the period of time as well, looking at ways of automating some of the asset capture and tagging, Dort of like OK, there’s a fire extinguisher there, there’s a fire door, there’s this, that. So we don’t necessarily, we can remove the need, we can concentrate the priority of the boots on the ground to focus on the things that need investigating. OK, so you can direct them and say look, we’ve got a mould patch here or we’ve got this dilapidation there or there’s that. So, they don’t have to explore the whole building.
GEORGE STEVENSON Barry, have you got any of the 360s that you took?
BARRY BASSNETT Not at the moment, no, but we’ll be getting that ready for the meeting on Monday. But what I’ll do is I’ll put those in the link and I’ll upload it with some of the 360s we’ve got. So, what we’ll do is we’ll put a portal with a link to this information in and then you can have a look at it. And as we build it up and build up the layers and stuff you can have access to it. And that’s the whole point is to share what we’re doing.
GEORGE STEVENSON Can we just go around. Andrew from Bowmer and Kirkland, I just wondered whether there’s anything from what we’re showing here that might be relevant to any of the projects that you’re working on?
ANDREW SIMPSON Yeah, I’ve had a look through some of the 360 options in the past which we do do, it actually is done at the moment. It’s interesting to see what’s happening across the board.
KEVIN MORRISSEY I work for BESA, building engineer services.
GEORGE STEVENSON So, you work with Kirsty?
KEVIN MORRISSEY Yeah, we’re part of the same group. I was interested in one of the topics that we are very focused on at the moment is mould and mould remediation. And somebody mentioned earlier in terms of Awaab’s Law. But at the moment there’s a lot of uncertainty as to how that should be actually implemented and what measures should be taken onsite. There’s equally issues around classifications of mould and exposure levels, other than the visible. So, at the moment we are I suppose you can see what you can see in terms of mould, but we’re considering how the measurement of mould and how the relative concentrations, both within and out with the building, should be measured and classified and implement action levels. So there may be an element there that draws our interest and attention from members.
GEORGE STEVENSON Mo, what do you think? Do you think we’re doing something interesting here?
MO SHANA’A Yeah, definitely. In an ideal world we have a lot of these things as information requirements and people don’t have to create this over and over again. I think the other thing hearing you speak that I was thinking about is ideally you’d have the requirements, but then in the back of that you’d almost get a recommendation for different ways of collecting against these requirements. And start heading in that direction.
I think definitely the idea of working as a community and building these requirements for different things would be really good. Because I think even when you had the scope up at the beginning, things like garage and plant room. And then you’re taking it down to that asset level. But once you’ve defined the plant room for here it will equally apply in some of the other workshops, like you have that lined up over the next day. So, it’s quite interesting if we model it in that direction and I think the conversation as well around classification is very, very interesting.
GEORGE STEVENSON Yeah, I think the other thing is that what we're trying to do at the moment is to have formal standardisation of how the detailed asset information is being collected. So we’re looking at the government’s standards, FMSOO2 I think it is. There’s a range of different standards that we can start to work to. I think a challenge at the moment id the EIRs and the AIRs that are being produced by clients, but often it’s consultants that are providing them, they actually aren’t that knowledgeable about what asset information is actually required. So, the result of that is that we’re getting quite a wide variety of information requirements that are contradictory. Well, not contradictory but they’re different.
So somebody is coming out, for example, we’ve got a conversation going on tomorrow around schools. Now, the DfE has got a very explicit set of information requirements that’s quite complex. And a lot of the requirements there, I think it’s unlikely that anybody will use from an asset management point of view. Because, with the greatest respect, they’ve not been put together by people that actually understand asset management. And therefore what they are asking for is they’re asking supply chains to provide back information that’s quite different than information that’s needed by let’s say the health service, or commercial buildings or housing associations. And therefore the fact is if you can come at it in a methodical way and say we’ve got a floor, we’ve got a space, what attributes do you need for a space?
What information do you need about the systems that are supporting those things? What information do you need to know about asset types? That’s one of the big problems that we’ve got. People aren’t actually identifying asset types. They are often jumping straight to individual assets. And that makes it a nightmare, Kirsty, with actually tagging that back from SFG20 perspective. So I think having that type of structured methodology. If we can improve the industry’s understanding of how to do that it’s important. But a lot of the authoring tools, and things like IFC, they’re not very well structured in being able to deliver information in that way. And therefore there’s a process that has to be done to enable that. And again, that’s really what this community can help with.
Ravi, you were explaining to me about the sort of projects that you’re involved with. i just wondered whether it’s all new, or whether you do get involved in ones where there’s existing buildings.
RAVI KIRAN We basically work on both new and existing build. I belong to a construction design and engineering firm. We work with owners like hospitals and airports and data centres. So, right now the projects that we’re working on is kind of a digital twin. The first thing is to standardise the data collection part for the new builds, bit for the existing build we are doing scans, building that federated data model out of it. Turning 2D CADs into 3D, using a little bit of AI to create those walls rapidly. And then we are doing pretty much the space management as well as the asset management for them. Right now we’re working for a very big hospital based out of Indiana, having more that 13 campuses, we started with one right now.
And right now the space management and space data capture is completed. We’ve been using COBie for asset data collection and standardising that. The UK uses Uniclass, but the US uses Omni? 53mins 55secs classification mostly for data standardisation. And we’re connecting to BMS systems to run fault detection diagnostics and integrate that systems with their CMMS and giving them performance reports on how the building is performing, or the campus is performing on a high level. So, this is where we are currently working on the focus is right now. In parallel we’re also working on on-boarding some of the other hospitals in Virginia.
STEVEN DUFFY I was just going to mention an area that I’m looking at is scan to simulation or scan to energy modelling. So, looking at utilising scanning technology and actually being able to look at existing state energy. So, I’d like to be able to contribute to that part within this forum as well.
GEORGE STEVENSON That would be really welcome.
STEVEN DUFFY Potentially using semantic segmentation, so being able to pull out automated assets from the scan data to utilise within that forum. For asset management and for energy modelling.
BARRY BASSNETT Picking up on that Steven, we haven’t specified thermal imaging as part and parcel of the survey yet. Do you think it worthwhile doing that as well?
STEVEN DUFFY I think it’s worthwhile, certainly to age the simulation, to give some more information into the simulation model, definitely.
BARRY BASSNETT To be honest, I’d not even thought of that, but you’re absolutely right. Energy consumption, insulation may be a very significant part of this project as well. It leads in to all of the things to do with condensation.
STEVEN DUFFY Yeah, just doing a health check on the existing building and recommendations on how it can be improved, that’s the area.
GEORGE STEVENSON Yeah, absolutely. One of the things, Barry, that we’ve done work with ad Tim has done work with is EPCs. So, to be able to relate the EPC information back as well. So i think that’s a really important part.
BARRY BASSNETT Let's see what we can do there to include that in the specification for what we do because it's a bit of a no brainer. Should have seen that one coming.
ANDREW SIMPSON We’ve been asked to put APCs in Briam as well, information. And we’re just wondering what format they would be put in.
GEORGE STEVENSON There’s two ways that we’re doing that and that’s reading the EPC data into the database, so you can then visualise the performance, or non-performance, of a particular facility. Or unit, for example, in housing terms. And therefore you can see where maybe there’s a lot of heat loss because there’s maybe problems with insulation. So yes, there’s some big opportunities there…Andrew, are you joining the school’s session tomorrow?
ANDREW SIMPSON I’m trying to, I’m struggling with time at the moment.
GEORGE STEVENSON To be honest, I need to apologise for that. It’s just that the forum meeting which took place 10 days ago, it was asking for these meetings. And I want to try and get them in before the end of July because there’s a lot of people going to be away. I apologise that it was such short notice. We had 25 people on the session this morning on safety critical assets. And 42 people on the data engineering. So, we’ve got quite a good traction there. And I think this has been helpful. Especially if we can use this to bring additional projects in where people are trying to do the same sort of thing, I think that would be very useful. Because we can circumvent some black holes.
ANDREW SIMPSON Yeah, we’ve had some success with trying to challenge the client’s rep, because I put that comment about they bring consultants in to interfere, to put a spanner in the works. And we’ve had a lot of them rejected. They’ve agreed to us now going forward because we asked the question why, it’s pertinent to ask that I think.
GEORGE STEVENSON Are you saying that they’re responded favourably, or not?
ANDREW SIMPSON In our favour, yeah. We’re just busy going through that process at the moment, hence why I wanted to hear about the feedback with regards to some requirements are still after.
GEORGE STEVENSON Yeah, one that we’re working on at the moment, they’re asking for flow rates on sinks. And flow rates on light switches as well I think, that’s an interesting one. I think by asking for too much information, especially if it’s the wrong information, it just undermines the process.
ANDREW SIMPSON Yeah, there’s things like demonstrating plant and access and maintenance methods, they still wish to do.
BARRY BASSNETT I think one last point, one of the interesting things is the amount of crossover that there is between all of these different things, whether it’s asset information engineering and what we’re trying to do. At some point it would be nice to pull all of these together and find a way that we’re sharing information between different groups.
CHAT
Fireflies.ai Notetaker Mohamma (Unverified)… Talk to Fireflies: (Web-search enabled)
- Say: Hey Fireflies how can you help?
- Type: /ff help
to get started. View real-time notes and transcription for this meeting here: https://app.fireflies.ai/live/01K1FWAY82K4TYC2Q7PC43AXHR?ref=live_chat
Mo Shana'a (External)… Barry Bassnett I don't know if you did that intentionally but Charlie Munger once said "Common sense is not so common" 😊
Andrew Simpson (Unverified)… We use this for fire stopping and QC checks too
Agree with the consultant comment re EIR/AIR to support govenment projects
Kirsty Cogan (External)… Apologies, I need to drop off. Thank you, this has been really interesting and great to hear there is appetite to look at standards mappings as part of it.