“To provide a more accurate ROI analysis on Buildings of the Future, a 3D approach is needed — one which presents the elements of design as interconnected pieces of a living and dynamic puzzle,” said James Bennett, Aurecon’s managing director - Built Environment. “Buildings of the Future must be designed to meet future expectations, while avoiding wasted space, inefficient designs, and inflexible stories. The paper explores why and how our thinking around ROI needs to evolve in line with this,” said Peter Greaves, Aurecon’s Buildings of the Future leader. Long-term thinking Aurecon calls for a ROI model that reflects the importance of design- ing buildings for the long term and looks at both the financial and non- financial benefits of intelligent buildings, such as improving employee productivity and wellbeing, while maintaining design flexibility to plan for a rapidly changing future. Long-term thinking can help companies avoid potential disruption. The importance of designing for the longer term and for changing space requirements was never better illustrated than when well-known architect Norman Foster admitted that he had got it wrong with Apple’s Campus 2 and its massive underground carpark for 11,000 cars by not allowing for retrofitting into habitable spaces as garages become less important and transportation patterns evolve. Legislation can also present significant disruption for those who don’t invest in the right tools and methodologies from the outset. For ex- ample, the European Commission is currently proposing a voluntary scheme for rating the “smart readiness” of buildings. The scheme, which is expected to be adopted by the end of 2019, will include de- velopment of a Smart Readiness Indicator (SRI), which will measure a building’s capacity to use information and communications technolgy and electronic systems to optimize operation and interact with the grid. With emerging exascale supercomputers, researchers will soon be able to accurately simulate the ground motions of regional earthquakes quickly and in unprecedented detail, as well as predict how these movements will impact energy infrastructure — from the electric grid to local power plants — and scientific research facilities. Berkeley Lab researchers lead development of a workflow to accurately predict ground movement and its impact on structures. Assessing regional earthquake risk and hazards in the age of exascale
The changing nature of construction “The changing nature of construction design and materials also plays an increasingly significant role in ROI. We are seeing an evolution in construction and maintenance with prefabricated construction, auto- mated technology such as robotics to install it, and additive printing, which drives down short- and long-term costs,” Bennett said. The ROI on a 3D printed building, for instance, is almost immediate, with its parts integrated into a digital model of the building that makes maintenance easy. Beyond construction and maintenance, these em- bedded digital parts also capture and monitor consumption and usage to optimize building performance over the long term. A holistic approach According to Aurecon, based on these non-financial factors, Buildings of the Future demand a more robust evaluation of their ROI. Intelligent buildings are the quintessence of future-ready architecture, but their true value lies in innovation and a shared vision, which neces- sitates moving away from old, one-dimensional models of measuring ROI, to synergetic models that encourage and thrive on collaboration throughout the entire life cycle, starting at the design stage. “For Buildings of the Future, idealistic future-focused models are nec- essary to measure value. Instead of spending too much time trying to demonstrate the financial ROI of intelligent buildings,” Greaves said, “We should rather be asking, ‘What will the cost be of not innovat- ing?’” Read or download “Buildings of the Future: Bottom-line benefits” at https://www.aurecongroup.com/en/markets/property/buildings-of-the- future.aspx.
Information provided by Aurecon (www.aurecongroup.com), a global engineering and infrastructure advisory company.
Currently, an interdisciplinary team of researchers from the Depart- ment of Energy’s (DOE’s) Lawrence Berkeley (Berkeley Lab) and Lawrence Livermore (LLNL) national laboratories, as well as the University of California at Davis, are building the first-ever end-to- end simulation code to precisely capture the geology and physics of regional earthquakes, and how the shaking impacts buildings. This work is part of the DOE’s Exascale Computing Project (ECP), which aims to maximize the benefits of exascale — future supercomputers that will be 50 times faster than our nation’s most powerful system today — for U.S. economic competitiveness, national security, and scientific discovery. “Due to computing limitations, current geophysics simulations at the regional level typically resolve ground motions at 1-2 hertz (vibra- tions per second). Ultimately, we’d like to have motion estimates on the order of 5-10 hertz to accurately capture the dynamic response
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csengineermag.com
january 2018
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