Great Railway Debate 18 March 2014

Great Railway Debate: How Britain’s railways can meet the needs of the 21st century  – This event, at 6pm on 18 March 2014 at the University of Reading, provides a briefing on the way in which the Railways are changing over the next 10 to 20 years, with the opportunity for the audience to ask questions and to express their own views. Professor Jennifer Whyte will be on the panel to talk about Digital Asset Information, discussing research on managing data from delivery into operations, alongside other speakers Rob Avery, Construction Planner for HS2; Terry Morgan, Chairman of Crossrail, Paul Newman, Network Rail. Chaired by Professor Stuart Green, this is the eighth in a series of similar events covering topics of general interest to both engineers and the general public, organised by the Engineering Institutions in the Thames Valley to demonstrate how engineering is contributing to developments in our railway system that will benefit the travelling public. For further information or to book to attend: http://www.reading.ac.uk/news-and-events/about-event-reg-greatdebate.aspx

BIM Workshop

Leif Granholm, Senior Vice President, Tekla

Leif Granholm, Senior Vice President at Tekla, Finland visited the Design Innovation Research Centre. He has been involved with the development of BIM related software since 1979, when he joined Tekla as Programmer, then IT Manager, Sales Representative, Senior Consultant, Technology Director and Director for both Public Infra and Energy/Utilities Business Areas. He has also worked as Managing Director for the Swedish Subsidiary and been responsible for Tekla’s construction industry business in the Nordic and the Baltic countries. Leif also participates in the planning of Tekla’s BIM strategy, implementation and support. He is Tekla’s strategic level representative in Building SMART and also serves as Trimble corp:s representative in OGC, building SMART alliance and a number of ISO committees.

Leif Granholm met with those staff and students at the University of Reading whose research area is related to BIM and made a presentation on DRUM research project dealing with distributed information management in BIM, and web based BIM.

Workshop on BIM

On Friday 1 November 2013, the Design Innovation Research Centre held a workshop on BIM. Several international academics were invited to make presentations at the workshop including John Messner, Professor of Architectural Engineering at Penn State University; Professor Rafael Sacks from Technion University in Israel; Professor Bimal Kumar from Glasgow Caledonian University; visiting Professor at the University of Reading Mervyn Richards and others.

PhD students from Reading, Penn State and UCL spoke about their research in BIM. Delegates had the opportunity to take part in demonstrations using the immersive displays in the Visualization and Interactive Technologies Centre.

Professor Rafael SacksBIM WorkshopDr Milan Radosavljevic

Autumn 2013 Newsletter out

The Design Innovation Research Centre Autumn Newsletter with our latest news is out now. The newsletter highlights our work with Infrastructure UK Client Group on collaborative project teams; a top 25 paper on digital design and safety; growing capacity as new staff join the School; summer placement projects on visualization workflows, model checking and COBie; and experiments with new routes to disseminate research findings through the website, blog, linked-in group and twitter. We always welcome any comments or queries related to our work, so please feel free to write them in the comments box below.

Digital design and building safety paper among top 25

The Design Innovation Research Centre article  “Construction safety and digital design: A review” by Wei Zhou, Jennifer Whyte and Rafael Sacks  is recognized by Science Direct as one of the Top 25 papers published in Automation in Construction in 2012.

This work has been discussed in a presentation on Digital Design and Safety on 10 September 2013  to the CIC event on BIM and Health and Safety (H&S). More details of the IOSH ‘Building Safely in Design’ are on the main website.

 

BIM and FM for university campuses

In July, the Design Innovation Research Centre hosted an online workshop to bring together research-intensive universities in which scholars are collaborating with their university estates and facilities departments to understand the new practices of using Building Information Modelling (BIM), and related technologies such as laser scanning and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) in Facilities Management on university campuses. This workshop enabled them to share leading practice, and lessons learnt in using BIM on university campuses.