Building the right tools for a more sustainable future
Tom is a Product Owner & Manager in the Buildings Team at Arup.
Developing digital tools to drive sustainable design in the built environment
Within the construction industry there is a growing need to not only understand the full environmental impact of our projects, but also to be actively reducing the potential impact of projects as they’re being designed. The construction industry accounts for 39% of all global carbon emissions at best estimate (WGBC, 2019). Achieving this reduction is no easy feat. Construction projects are inherently complex.
If your typical building was a Lego model, it would contain millions of blocks and be constructed by 10–20 independent people simultaneously; each focusing on their own task. Sometimes these people have instructions to aid them, though these are often vague. From Architects, structural engineers, lighting designers, building services engineers and contractors; each has their own responsibilities, systems and nuances.
Within Arup we have teams of sustainability experts, many of whom have dedicated large portions of their careers to understanding the environmental impact of our projects. The role of our digital teams in growing our environmental capabilities has been to investigate the processes and workflows taken, find opportunities for efficiency, develop new tools (when appropriate), and then implement those tools in the teams that need them. So far this has manifested as 2 new tools for Arup:
- The Arup Carbon Tool (ACT) — a means of assessing the embodied carbon of projects from their Building Information Models (BIMs)
- Veracity | db — a database of datasets containing information relating to the environmental impact of materials, components and products.
The Arup Carbon Tool (ACT)
A barrier in reducing the potential impact of projects is in the time it takes to collate all the information needed to make an assessment. The lag between collation and computation means that by the time an assessment has been made it is often too late to implement the best changes. The project has moved on.
Fortunately, creating a Building Information Model (BIM) is increasingly business as usual for design teams. Working with BIMs offers design teams the opportunity to work collaboratively. To use the Lego analogy — it allows those building to talk to one another, identify where things can and can’t go, and work towards an optimal arrangement of blocks. It also creates an excellent database of the components that need assessing.
ACT essentially maps these components against factors for embodied carbon (the amount effort that goes into creating and installing those components in a project, represented as equivalent carbon dioxide emissions). If a BIM exists on a project, performing this assessment can be completed in as little as 10 minutes (down from days / weeks), providing the design team with near-instantaneous feedback on the total embodied carbon equivalent of that model.
To aid in reducing emissions, and because a BIM can be viewed as a 3D representation of the final project, ACT creates a colour map of the components used, their impact and their location in the model, this enables the team to discuss the most carbon intensive areas of the design and reduce through iteration, whether that’s using more sustainable materials, optimising the quantum of materials used, or adjusting the form for a smaller impact.
All of this is completed in a web-application with no direct installation required. Speckle is used to stream models into the tool and reports can be easily shared to all interested parties making embodied carbon visible to all, not just the experts.
It’s important to note here that embodied carbon is only one part of the environmental narrative (though a pretty significant one). An understanding of a projects impact across its full life-span is the bigger picture. In the future we aim to attack other areas of this whole life assessment. ACT is just the beginning.
Veracity | db
Something that Arup prides itself on (and rightly so) is the wealth of knowledge that it’s experts bring as a collective, not least in sustainability. These experts are located around the globe. Pulling that knowledge together and maintaining its relevance can be difficult. This is the challenge that Veracity | db looks to at least partly solve for environmental impact data.
During the development of ACT, we were increasingly flagging that much of the reference data being stored within the tool had a definite ‘use by’ date and that we were creating a data silo within the tool not directly connected to the experts who’d usually be recommending these values to design teams for their own assessments. This was a problem. How were we supposed to create something useful if we were constantly expending effort in maintaining the data to prevent it going out of date?
Interestingly the data used in embodied carbon assessments is usually open and curated by external parties. It comes from Environment Product Declarations (EPDs) for specific products or from datasets that try to develop sensible figures from the available data across the industry. Arup doesn’t typically curate this data, but does collate it within our regions.
Our aim with Veracity | db has been to elevate this collated data and compile it into a single-source of information for Arup globally. Arup’s experts still advise on what constitutes as being ‘good’ or relevant data, but now that advice can reach a much larger audience within the firm. This makes finding things easier and reduces duplication of efforts when we lack the awareness of what are neighbours have been doing.
A second major benefit is that, once in a database, this information can be utilised by tools like ACT through an API. So long as the database remains relevant we can keep design teams and the tools they use well informed.
The database itself is made up of ‘objects’ from the available sources, sorted into materials, components and products. Each object can have it’s own properties and values. We’ve tried to keep it light on data schema — low maintenance being a priority — but have implemented a few conventions to ensure that different datasets in different regions can map well against each other.
There are a heap of directions that we could be going with this, not least appending other datasets to existing objects (such as combustibility, cost and thermal parameters) so that design can be completed holistically from this single source as an input.
For now we want to nail it before we scale it. There’s work to be done before we start to expand.
And there you have a quick run down of two digital tools we’ve been building to enhance our business offering in sustainability and tackle some of the major questions that we as an industry are facing. Arup are almost uniquely placed to deliver tools like this (when a gap exists), with feet firmly placed in both the environmental sustainability and digital realms.
If you’d like to hear more from us on the subject, feel free to get in touch. We are happy to share our experiences and thoughts in tackling problems that not only Arup but the construction industry as a whole. Also watch this space for future developments. We’re by no means done on the subject.
Perfection is the enemy of progress. Good is the enemy of great. We can strive for perfection but we won’t let it get in the way of delivering great things.
Find out more
If any of the content in this article is of interest, please get in touch with tom.bunn@arup.com
If you would like to learn more about Digital at Arup read more about our work here.
