This is the site of the UCSF Medical Center at Mission Bay in San Francisco. The contractors have been there for over a year and there’s not much to show for it on the ground. That is because since April 2009 the client, contractor, sub-contractors and consultants have been inside a room – a very big room – on the edge of the site creating a full digital pre-build of the hospital. The room’s title reveals its ambition -

This project came onto our radar during the Integrated Project Delivery (IPD) research we did with the University of Melbourne. I took Digital Innovation on tour to three of our American offices in June and during my stay in San Francisco my itinerary included a day at Stanford University’s Center for Integrated Facility Engineering (CIFE) Summer Program and a site visit to UCSF Mission Bay.

The two link nicely as much of the thinking about how IPD fits into the construction sector in California has been developed at CIFE with Martin Fischer and John Kunz. This year’s CIFE Summer Program was focussed on IPD in practice and Atul Khanzode and Dean Reed from DPR presented. DPR is the contractor for UCSF Mission Bay. Arup is the MEP services consultant on the project.

Its not a full IPD project, as it is not operating under a multi-party agreement. Rather, it is a full integrated design financed by the client in order to achieve some of the rewards on offer through shifting the design effort earlier in the project. There are similarities in operation with IPD. The contractors, sub-contractors and consultants are a multi-party network responsible for determining specific project targets in alignment with the client’s project goals.

There were early stage workshops at CIFE to develop what metrics were appropriate for this project, and they are broadcast to the team from displays all around the room. At a glance anyone can see what quantities of a particular wall type are on the job or how many clashes remain to be resolved.

I visited the site with Raj Daswani and Reid Senscu from our San Francisco office. We were talking with Chris, the plumbing sub (above), when the steel sub came up to discuss plumbing bracing and coordination with steel. The level of trust and immediacy to decision makers is the key to the current success of the process. In the early days, the ‘big room’ referred to three rooms that were set aside for regular review meetings however they are not used much now. People know each other and negotiate with other disciplines one on one.

Throughout our visit we were told there was scepticism when this process started, but uniformly people said they didn’t want to work another way from here on.

There is full commitment to the process. The architects, including the firm’s principals, are in the big room working on the architectural model and not far away the plumbing sub-contractors are modelling details right down to bolts in their own software. One of the architects told us they had lost their seats back in their office.

We’re going to hear more about this project. Already they are estimating considerable savings from this investment in integration. What more will they reap when they start construction?

Many thanks to John Griffiths, Raj Daswani and Reid Sensecu from Arup San Francisco.

Mobile phone user on CityRail, Sydney

This update is in three parts: ‘our approach’; ‘the hardware’; and ’sensing’.

A quick technical update on our mobile phone sensing project with UTS (see earlier post for context). This project is exploring technical approaches to sensing the presence of mobile phones in transit environments (bus, train, ferry etc.) as well as pedestrians, in order to provide real-time data on such activity, potentially informing urban planning and transport planning decisions. Such approaches might reveal how the city is being used, in real-time. This write-up will get a little geeky in places, but we share it in the hope you’ll find something interesting in the overall idea or the particular approach, and do feel free to contribute via the comments form at the bottom of each post. We’re interested in your feedback.

Our colleagues at the Centre for Real-Time Information Networks (CRIN) at UTS have made significant progress in terms of both the sensing process and the hardware prototypes.

Dealing with the first part, we’ve been exploring a ’stack’ approach to sensing phones, starting with scanning for Bluetooth, then wi-fi, then GSM, and so on. This is partly due to ease of sensing, and partly exploring ethical issues i.e. if people have Bluetooth turned on, or wi-fi connecting to routers automatically, can we assume they are more likely to be happy to be sensed? (Probably not, due to poor design on the part of mobile phone software meaning many may leave it on by default without paying much attention to it thereafter, but part of the point of the research is to explore these issues of privacy and security as well as technical approaches.)

And dealing with the first of those wireless technologies, CRIN have made particular progress in terms of sensing Bluetooth. Using the basic Bluetooth scanning functionality in a PC or Mac Mini, say, we can sense people with Bluetooth turned on and visible if they’re walking past slowly, due to the relatively slow default scan rate i.e. it takes a while for the scanners to detect and observe the phones in the vicinity (the scan rate takes over a second, and is dependent on the number of devices. In essence the scanning uses multiples of 1.28 seconds, with the number of multiples increasing the liklihood of finding all devices. A good quick summary can be found in this PDF.)

As we’re trying to spot a couple of things – for example, both passengers in transit or waiting at a bus-stop (more static) and also pedestrians (moving at around 1-5m/s) – and given the likelihood of groups in these scenarios and the low numbers of people scannable, we needed to increase the Bluetooth scan time.

There are legal and illegal ways to do this. Choosing the former route, CRIN have made great progress in terms of speeding up the scan time, and the detection rate. Software is being written in Python, on the Linux operating system – rather than say Processing on Mac OSX, where the need to parse higher-level languages with limited direct interfaces between Bluetooth drivers and Java would slow things down a little – and several hardware approaches have also been explored, with the current solution considering using multiple Bluetooth dongles in an array, staggering scan times

The range of Bluetooth (class one) effectively turns out to be around 5-20m (depending on the particular dongles employed, the structures in that environment, and so on. Wi-fi is much broader). Of course, in transit, on a bus, train, or tram, or relatively stationery at a bus-stop/platform, the captive audience is much easier to spot.

(NB: the RTA assumes people walk about 1.2 m/s on average, according to their transport planning regulations.)

Essentially, the array of Bluetooth dongles is now able to scan phones much faster, and certainly within our intended environments of buses, trains, bus-stops, platforms, stations etc. Recall that the original rationale for this project is to generate real-time feeds on transit activity in urban areas, as most current transit data is not real-time, not particularly scalable, doesn’t uncover individual ‘multi-modal’ trips where someone might walk to a bus-stop and then switch to a train, say.

Given this impetus, the scan-rate from the Bluetooth array achieved above is certainly good-enough as a start. The next requirement is to wirelessly communicate this data in real-time to ‘the cloud’, via a small robust ‘box’ that could be installed in such environments.

In the next post, we’ll discuss the emerging hardware prototype.

The DesignLink Software Development toolKit (SDK) is now open via a collaboration agreement. DesignLink is designed to assist in the development of software to solve interoperability problems between various programs used in the built environment (AEC) design process.

Here is a link to an earlier post and DesignLink’s ArupForge page lists some of the software packages and processes we’ve already tackled. Its open now to extend and contribute.

Following are two videos of DesignLink in action. The first shows the use of Octave/Matlab to drive the generation of EnergyPlus and Radiance files from a GenerativeComponents model. Then Paul Jeffries from Arup AGU shows his Rhino3D to GSA tool called Salamander.

Contact us for further information.

Though many talk of the need for our cities to adapt and change to respond to current and future demands achieving significant change remains somehow elusive. The Melbourne Cities Transition Cluster is being established to focus on the implementation of platform projects that demonstrate and lead the transition of Melbourne towards a sustainable future. Arup’s role in the Cluster, in addition to driving formation, will be to promote the utilisation of digital innovations as key enablers to deliver on the Cluster’s objective as it charts a course into new territory. Application of innovation will be critical in four areas:

• Communication to the cities’ residents and businesses about new futures for our built environment. This digital component of the Cluster will be essential to the process of building people’s confidence and support for new forms of built environment. Recently, Arup developed Digital Manchester, a 3D rendition computer model of the entire inner Manchester area and provides the City with a tool that can be developed for an enormous range of uses including flood defense mapping and also how cities can be retrofitted to mitigate against climate change. The model is viewed using computer gaming technology and enables users to virtually fly, walk and circle the streets and buildings of inner Manchester. This tool has been modified and adapted for use in consultation to enable the attendees to ‘walk around’ the proposed master-plan.
• Data collation, analysis and synthesis to enable effective integration of development solutions and implementation of preferred solutions that achieve lower environmental resource use and impact, while maintaining equivalent or higher quality of life outcomes. The Urban Energy Systems project at Imperial College London is an example in this area (refer figure 1 below), which aims to identify the benefits of a model-based, integrated approach to the design and operation of urban energy systems. The primary methodology involves the development of a holistic model of the city, involving the city layout, the behaviour of its citizens, the flow and conversion of resources (materials and energy) and the associated infrastructure. A key component is a model of the population and how, as individuals, they interact with the infrastructure. This enables the matching of energy demand and supply in innovative ways.

• Providing visualisation and modelling support to enable shared appreciation about the best solutions to city transition to develop amongst the Clusters diverse participant membership group.
• Mapping stakeholder networks to domains of influence, transition arenas and implementation sequencing to support strategic engagement of stakeholders in the process of transition.

To understand more about the The Melbourne Cities Transition Cluster contact me at Arup.

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