£1.6 million funding for production control room technology to improve the management of complex projects
Innovate UK has announced £1.6 million of funding for a new ‘demonstrator’ project that will deploy a new production control room concept on some of the UK’s most complex and challenging projects.
The solution, called the ‘AEC Production Control Room’, will be led by Mace alongside a number of partners, UCL, Imperial College London, 3D Repo, Mission Room and eviFile. The team will develop and deploy a project control room system, built on live data feeds, that will radically improve the management and delivery of complex projects and programmes.
The demonstrator project is one of nine that have been announced as the next tranche of innovation funding delivered through the Government’s Construction Sector Deal.
The 24 month project commenced in May 2020 and sees an expert team bought together to blend academic insight and private sector delivery experience. It includes Mace, who will be leading and coordinating the project, academic input and support from researchers at UCL and Imperial College London, as well as private sector support from 3D Repo, Mission Room and eviFile.
The team will create a solution to help UK construction clients and contractors to be more efficient and proactive rather than reactive, with a scalable and repeatable ‘plug-and-play’ construction management and reporting platform known as the ‘AEC Production Control Room’.
Backed by I3P, the project team are currently in discussions with a number of the UK’s largest infrastructure clients to introduce the concept onto their projects to enhance visibility and oversight. The new concept fits closely with a full ‘Project 13’ approach to delivering projects and programmes, enabling ‘integrators’ to act more effectively.
Mark Reynolds, Mace Group Chief Executive, said: “The Construction Sector Deal was designed to help the sector deliver transformative innovation, improving productivity and helping us deliver projects more effectively. This is a fantastic example of innovation funding doing exactly that.
“The project control room concept has the potential to improve decision-making through real-time visibility of data while delivering complex projects, something that could be transformative in the future. I look forward to working with our fantastic partners over the next two years to bring this concept to life.”
