Designing Low-Impact Infrastructures: Carbon Footprint and Safety Uses Cases

ERIC PRUVOST: Welcome to this AU class. I am Eric Pruvost, and together with Lucas Gibaud, we will explain to you how to use BIM data and technologies to design low impact infrastructures.

Before starting, a few words about us. Lucas Gibaud is leading the development of several BIM solutions, and I am in charge of SYSTRA BIM transformation program.

Let me start with a quick introduction of the subject. As stated by Pierre Verzat, our chief executive officer, our ambition at SYSTRA is to be the signature team for transportation solution. Stating that brings responsibilities. In particular, it means that we must deliver infrastructures that are always safer and more sustainable.

To meet our ambitions, we have defined six major challenges that our BIM research and development program should tackle in order to support our teams to deliver railway project with innovating solution that will meet our client challenges.

Today, we will provide you insights on the two solutions that help our design team to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and reduce safety related risk on our projects.

But it is, in fact, a full range of solutions that have been developed to create, manage, and use BIM data to improve the efficiency of our design teams.

In the field of data creation, we have developed since more than five years 12 modules of our linear infrastructure design authoring solution, BiMinOneClick that allow to automate the design of railway infrastructures.

In the field of data management, since 2018, we have developed two applications, eLODy and Pablo. eLODy is our BIM checker that enables us to manage BIM design quality and ensure that data delivered to our client is fully reliable.

Pablo is a unique tool that has been developed based on our return of experience on HS2 to support our client to build that BIM asset information register and requirements and manage the BIM data in order to develop the asset information model.

Nevertheless, today, we will focus on Carbon Tracker and SafebyBIM applications that are designed to deliver low carbon and low safety related risk infrastructures.

So let's dive into the main part, which is how to use BIM data to manage and reduce the carbon impact of the infrastructure we design.

Trusting to say is that we are all concerned. Nevertheless, as a designer, we have a major role to play in this battle against carbon emissions. Indeed, it is fully recognized that most of the future carbon emission of an infrastructure are already locked in before the end of the design. Therefore, as a designer, we can make a difference.

Knowing that, we design Carbon Tracker application to make sure that the design teams have the right information about carbon emissions at the right time in order to take the right decisions. The first challenge and main functionality of Carbon Tracker is to allow to capture the data of the design in order to provide the carbon impact during the design process. By doing so, we meet our first objective to implement a more systemic co-design process fully integrated in the design process. And that ensure that, again, all the design decisions will be taking into account its carbon impact.

The second objective of the application is to allow our design team to better collaborate and be as efficient as possible by focusing first on carbon hotspots. This is achieved by providing managing tools to visualize, compare, and filter emissions, and identify where to put design efforts.

Finally, the last objective is more a mid-term one. By implementing the solution, we will be able to capitalize on our experience and improve our capacity to evaluate precisely carbon emissions at even early design stages.

So before diving into the demo, let me give you a quick overview of the solution, which is built around three parts. First, the configuration. Second, the calculation. And finally, the monitoring of the carbon impact.

Let's start with the configuration. This part is the strategic part of the solution. It is designed to overcome the project environment and stability we face on our daily jobs and the lack of open BIM standards. It allows us to adapt the solution to the project requirements and make sure that the data that will be imported in the solution will be understood and correctly treated based on expected requirements.

In particular, it defines the mandatory information that will have to be modeled and that will be checked by the application prior to any CO2 calculation. The calculation part use, of course, the BIM technology to calculate the carbon emissions. The calculation can integrate the CO2 emissions due to the construction but also to the operation of the assets.

It is key to understand that the solution is designed to calculate the CO2 impact using mixed data extracted from the project, BIM and non BIM. And this, in order to adapt to the BIM maturity of the project. Please note that we have also developed a tool using GIS technology for the carbon calculation due to transportation.

As I said earlier, Carbon Tracker solution is meant to support the design team to manage a carbon impact alongside the design process. So this last part gives the information needed by the project management but also by the design expert in order to take this decision and track the carbon emissions.

Here you have the main dashboard that allows the team to follow the CO2 calculation progress and the performance of the assets.

And there, on this last slide, you have an extract on the CO2 tracker tool that helps the co- designer to analyze the CO2 emission distribution, define the hot spot, and focus on or compare design alternatives.

So I will give now the mic to Lucas Gibaud that will give you a demo on Carbon Tracker.

LUCAS GIBAUD: Hello. So before going forward with the demo and enter the application, just some quick words to share the summary and a schema to talk about the project asset break down.

So for the demo, we will first start with the presentation of the project page, and then we will have a quick overview of the project configuration page. After this, the next step will be to integrate a new model into our project and to get the result of the carbon calculation of its components.

As most of our projects, we are working on are not fully in BIM, and as explained by Eric previously, it's very important to integrate all the data of the project to have a complete carbon analysis. For that, we will review how we can directly in the application integrate this non BIM data. And to finish, we will put ourselves in a co-designer shoes, and we will try to reduce the carbon emission of our project using Varient Management and Analysis Tools we can find in Carbon Tracker.

Before going on the Carbon Tracker application, one important thing to explain is the asset breakdown of the projects. This will help you to better understand what we will see during the demo. In order to have a better analysis of the carbon emission distribution, and not to only have a global approach of a project, we will split all our projects in several sections that we will call assets.

Each assets are similar properties. So let's take the first example on the top right corner. Each asset has a specific goal. The asset has also a specific type, which is your development asset type. The list of all the asset types has to be defined at the beginning of the project, and we will see that this list will be stored in the project configuration in Carbon Tracker.

And finally, each asset is composed by several files. You can see here that the specific asset is composed by 4b models which are IFC files and one non-BIM data file, which is an Excel file. The second example at the bottom left of the screen is the one we will see later during the demo. This one is another asset type, which is a viaduct asset type. This asset is composed of one non- BIM data file and one BIM model, which is the file we will try to integrate in Carbon Tracker in a few minutes.

So now, let's move to the application. Here is the project hub where any user can find all its accessible projects. Carbon Tracker is a web application, so you can use any internet browser to connect. On this project of page, the user can go from one project into another using the Activate button. Once you have selected the projects you are working on, you can go to the project configuration page.

The project configuration page is composed by several sections. The first one is quite basic, and this is the project information section. Then, you have the second part, which is the project backups. This one is quite important. And it's the place where the user can basically store the state of the project. And of course, will be later capable of restoring the backup state.

The subparts is the co- design configuration. This is the place where the co- designer can set up the hypothesis that the software will take for the carbon calculations. As discussed earlier on this slide, we have seen that we need to split our project in multiple assets. So the asset lease section is the place where the eco- designer will define the list of all the asset of the project, defining the code and the type of each assets.

Then, the next part is the transport configuration. This is the place where you will define the transport combination options of your project components.

The next part is very important and is the project component database. This is where you will define all the calculation inputs that you will be taken into account to calculate the carbon emission of each project components.

The last three section of the project configuration are the settings in order to be able to read the data coming from the models and from the other type of files. This is the place where you will define the property names that the software will use to get all the data from these models. You will find also a section where you will be able to define the chicken routes you will use in the BIM models.

This will help you to ensure that the data of the BIM models are compliant with the requirements of carbon calculation. But we will see this during the integration of the BIM model into Carbon Tracker just now.

As explained earlier in the slide, we will try to integrate a new BIM model in the project, which is a viaducts. For that, we have to go in the model playground page. Display this page is the place where any user we upload the new data in the project. Either it's a BIM model or other type of data, like an Excel file, we will see just after.

For BIM models, the user can upload them directly on Carbon Tracker and clicking on the button load. You can download a single file or multiple files at one time. As soon as the model is uploaded, Carbon Tracker will use forge APIs to be able to convert BIM model's input formats to a specific format that can be viewable on the forge viewer.

As soon as the conversion is completed, the file will be located on the left side of the screen. Then, you just have to click on the file to open the BIM Model Viewer. You can easily recognize the forge viewer that you have probably used within BIM 360, for example. So we have extended this year with some specific functionalities that you can see on the left side of the screen.

The first section, when you open a BIM model with Carbon Tracker, will be to check if the BIM model is ready and compliant with the project configuration. It means if the object of the model can be used for carbon calculations. For that, thanks to the parameter and the rules we have defined in the project configuration page, Carbon Tracker will proceed to a complete check of the BIM model.

In order to do that, you just need to click on the first button, and then to click on the button Apply. And directly, the process will run to check if all the project components are compliant with the requirements. The result will be directly displayed on the BIM model. In green, you will have all the objects that are compliant with the requirements, and you will have in blue all the elements that cannot be taken into account by the software for the carbon calculations.

Indeed, these elements do not contain an asset tag parameter or classification parameter. The observer turn of the application will help you to analyze and communicate these results. In order to have some analytics on the checking result, you can click on the second button, and you will reach the model analytics. You will find there the object figures with the number of objects in the model and the percentage of compliant objects.

Then, you have the asset figures, where you can find a number of elements that contains asset ties. It means we can link them to a specific asset of the project. And the last part is the classification figures. This is where you will find if the objects have been correctly classified. This classification is a very important topic of the application because it's the way the application will recognize the class of the object and will be able later to link an object to a project component that we have defined in the configuration.

When you have analyzed the result of the checking, it's quite important to be able to share these results with the other member of the project and to help the BIM production teams to modify their BIM models. For that, Carbon Tracker provide functionalities to export the results of the checkings in two different formats, Excel and BCF.

The BCF format is an open BIM format to share comments based on a BIM model, and that can be easily integrated in all the production software.

And finally, the last button on the left in the viewer will allow you to export the result to the database for the carbon calculations. On the panel, you will have the list of all the components that have been detected by the software, and that can be exported to the database. This will allow you to have a quick view on the results before sending them to the database.

When you are ready to send this, you can just click on the button on the top left, and this will launch the calculation and exit the viewer. Automatically, all the calculations are processed in the back end. So before checking the results, let's do the same process for a non BIM data file.

The example we will take is a carbon emission generated by the construction site accommodations. On earlier project, these assets are not designed in BIM, and these values are given most of the time by the constructors based on their experience. According to the size of the construction site, the number of workers, the construction timelines, and other inputs, they will estimate the carbon emissions generated by these accommodations.

These emissions are very important, and we cannot analyze correctly and globally our projects without taking this into consideration. For that, as this data cannot be calculated from the model, we will provide an Excel file. In Carbon Tracker, the process to calculate data from other type of file is quite similar than the one we have seen from the BIM model. We just have to go on the model program page and just upload your Excel file.

Then, as for the BIM model, the software will check the data contained in the Excel file is compliant with what we expect to receive. If not, the software will provide you warnings and explain what are the points to modify. If everything is correct, you can check the data that have been read by the software, and then you can send the data to the database for the carbon calculations.

So when the calculation has been done, you will want to check the result at the project level. For that, the user can go to the project cockpit page. On this page are presented all the result of the project according to multiple views. On the top left side you can find the global figures of the project. For example, you have the number of assets, the number of constituent parts of the project.

The constituent parts representing a BIM model context, BIM objects. Then you have the number of files that have been used on the project and the number of object types that have been defined in the project configuration and used in the project.

In the top right corner of the screen, you can find the project lifecycle results, which are the carbon emission of the project and that are classified by life cycle stage. The naming of this life cycle is very well known of the co- designer and is defined in the 14,000 40 ISO num series. To sum up this very quickly, A1 is revealed is the carbon emission due to the production of the components. A4 is the transport of them to construction site. A5 the emission produced by their installation and construction sites.

B2 is for the maintenance. B4 is for the replacement, and B6 is for the operation. It means the energy consumption of the component during the operation stage.

And C1 is for the demolition if, of course, the component has to be deconstructed.

As you can understand, the result we are displaying are related to the hypothesis that we have taken about the target year for the calculation. Here, the target here, is 120 years after the start of the construction of the project. Of course, to have a good analysis of the carbon emissions, we need to have the ability to view the result according different target shows.

That the functionality of the slider we have at the top right corner, which allows us to change the target year calculation and all the graphic of the cockpit will be modified dynamically. At the bottom of the cockpit, you have the asset types graphic, which allow the user to have a good view about the distribution of the carbon emissions across the different type of assets. Each bar represents the amount of carbon emissions generated by the different type of asset on the project.

This graphic can also be dynamically change with the target year slider. But you can also change its view to switch from the carbon emission to the tonnage of material to transport to the construction site.

The restriction is what you can see at the middle of the cockpit, which is the emission reduction. This result allows the project to compare its global emission with a baseline hypothesis that has been taken at the beginning of the project. For that, in Carbon Tracker, you can set the carbon immersion baseline from values in the project configuration over the second option is to select another project of the application.

So now, to conclude the demo, we will put ourselves in a co-designer shoes, and we will try to reduce the carbon emission of our project using Variant Management and Analysis Tools we have in Carbon Tracker. For that, the first thing we will do is to check the result with the analysis tools of Carbon Tracker. This tool will allow us to have a very good understanding of the carbon as part of our projects.

So it's a hierarchical pie chart that shows the distribution of the carbon emission across the project and based on multiple parameters. The hierarchy inside the pie is represented by the rings. By default, the hierarchy is the following. The first ring is the asset type. The second one is the asset instances. Then the third one is the object category. And finally, at the bottom of the hierarchy, you will find object types.

The figures at the center of the pie chart is the amount of carbon emission we are looking at when moving on the diagram. And the figures on the top next to the path we have taken in the diagram is a percentage of the carbon emission.

So if we change the hierarchy of the pie chart to have the object category and the object type at the first levels, we can see that the concrete foundation components have a huge impact on the project. The foundation components of the rigid inclusions, the concrete piles, concrete pilecaps, wooden slab, and so on. So in our example, we will try to reduce the carbon emission of a project in changing the concrete type of these components in using a less carbon emitting concrete.

So for that, we will go to the project configuration page. Before changing anything in the application, we will start by stirring the state of the project to be later capable of comparing the results with the current state. For that, we have to go to the project backup section and create a new backup of our project. Then, as the project has been saved, we can proceed with the change of the concrete.

For that, we will use a concrete where the cement is replaced by 70% of blast furnace slag. For that, all the concrete types have available on the project have been defined in the concrete mix definition table. And then, we can change the concrete mix type of all the concrete foundation components. For that, we just need to switch the concrete mix on the concrete foundation components.

As soon as the change has been done, Carbon Tracker will automatically recalculate all the carbon emission of the projects. And once this is finished, we can go on the project analysis page where we will be able to compare the two states of our project to see if the change of the concrete mix for the foundation has a positive impact on the carbon emission.

For that, in the project's analysis space, we can use the compare tool and select another state of our project to compare. And we can see that the total amount of the carbon emission has now been reduced by changing the concrete type, and that the percentage of the impacts of the foundation components have also been reduced.

On the left side of the screen, you can see the result of the current state where the concrete type has been replaced. And on the right side of the screen, you can see the previous state where the cement of the foundation concrete components have not been replaced.

So that's all for the Carbon Tracker demo. So now let's move. We've saved by BIM.

ERIC PRUVOST: OK. So let's move on to the next section. And this second part is to deal with a strategic challenge we have to master and fulfill our mission to deliver safe infrastructure.

So to do so, and to support our project team, we have developed a solution called SafebyBIM that we are now going to give you an overview.

Construction industry is a high risk industry. We all know that. But as professional entity managing construction, it is our responsibility to ensure safety is properly managed. So far, most of the effort have been done to make the construction site safer. But we still need to improve the safety by trying to eliminate safety risk at this end stage before there appears on site and requires protection works.

This is what we call Safe By Design.

Managing risk at design phase is not so obvious for two main reasons. First, the lack of maturity of our design team that focused more on operational requirements leaving the subject of safety to construction teams even though the design can influence this level of risk that the construction teams will have to deal with.

The lack of efficient tools and processes is the second difficulty. And even where the process on developed, safety risk management is often seen as an additional burden by design teams because they are not efficient, and also because they don't have the right tool to make it valuable for themselves. And also because they are more dedicated to prove that safety has been taken into account into the design.

That's the reason why we work with our safety manager in the UK to develop SafeByBIM that will have them managing the safety risk but also bring value to the design teams.

SafebyBIM has been designed to make this environment-- SafebyBIM has been designed to provide a unique source of information and environment to manage the whole lifecycle of each identified safety risk of a project from its creation to its transfer or closure. It has been designed to make this environment configurable to suit any client and project processes requirements in terms of safety risk management.

It also has been designed to provide a user-friendly interface to create these risks and connect them to their contacts in the 3D BIM model and help managing them.

Finally, it has been designed to ensure accessibility to the safety risk through a web based interface in order to guarantee good communication, efficient collaboration, and well-informed design decision. In the end, SafebyBIM should allow to implement robust safety risk management process and provide traceability and analytics of the safety risk evolution on the whole lifecycle.

This should ease the work of the safety manager but also provide reliable insight to the project and design team leaders in order to deliver SafebyDesign infrastructures.

So let's now move on to the demo of SafebyBIM. I will give back to my Lucas.

LUCAS GIBAUD: Hi again.

So before going forward with the demo, just some quick work to have a good understanding of the hazard management process and some definitions. We can sum up the hazard management process in three steps. The first step is the hazard identification where the safety manager and the discipline needs to identify the hazards of the project. The hazards can be classified in three categories, CDM hazard, CSM hazard, or both.

The second step of the hazard management process is to assess the hazard in evaluating its frequency and its impact on the project. This is very important and will help to prioritize between all the hazards of the projects.

And the last step is about the control strategy of the hazard and its follow up on the project. Depending to the complexity and the assessment of the hazard, the hazard can be avoided, transferred to third parties, mitigated, or accepted. As you can understand, due to the number of hazards that can be described on a railway project, it's very important to provide a tool that can help the teams to control and follow this process.

And finally, as a project are designed in BIM, it's quite important to ensure that the hazard management can follow the evolution of the design. For that, SafebyBIM will provide the ability to directly integrate the hazards into the BIM models.

So now, let's connect to the application. So when you connect to the application, you will find the project hub page. The project hub is where any user can find all its accessible projects. As Carbon Tracker, SafebyBIM is a web application, so you can use any internet browser to connect.

On this project hub page the user can go from one project into another using the Activate button.

All hazards of the project will be stored in the hazard database and can be reviewed going to the hazard page. As each hazard contains a lot of data, that's why its properties are split between different categories in order to facilitate its visualization. Most of these categories correspond to the hazard management process we have just discussed before. The hazard can be checked by the table as we are doing now, but also individually. For that, you just need to click on the Modify button, and you will be redirected to the hazard individual page.

On this page, you will find all the feed of the hazard. But there is also one additional information on this page, which is quite interesting. It's the audit trail. It will allow any user to check all the change that have been made on this specific hazard.

If we come back to the hazard page, we can, of course, create a hazard by clicking on the button New. If you click on this button, you will find the same page as the modification one, but this time with empty fields. If you provide all the mandatory fields, a new hazard will be created in the database. But on project, most of the hazards are identified during meetings where the safety management team and the design needs identify the new hazards.

For that, they are using Excel files. That why SafebyBIM provide a very useful functionality, which is to import Excel file containing the hazard definition in order to complete or modify the database. For that, in SafebyBIM you can export and then import the hazard from Excel.

When the hazard has been identified, they can be linked to the design using BIM models. For that, will use the forge APIs to convert BIM models and use them on the web browser. The process for operating BIM models is similar to the Carbon Tracker process. As soon as the model is ready, it will come on the left side of the screen and the user can open it in clicking on it.

As Carbon Tracker, you can easily recognize the forge viewer that you have probably used within BIM 360. So we have extended this viewer with some specific functionalities that you can see on the left side of the screen. The first action the user will want to do is to display the current hazards that are available in the model. For that, you just need to click on the first button to display the results. But you will just want to have hazard table to be able to interact and understand the hazards that have been placed on the model.

For that, you can use the second button, which will open the hazard table. If you select a row in the table, the hazard symbol in the model will be automatically highlighted, but you can also use the eye button on the first quadrant of the table, which will allow you to zoom and select the object that have been associated to the hazard.

In order to associate hazard with the BIM model you have two options. Whether you want to drop the hazard model but with no relation with BIM objects, so for that, you can use the [INAUDIBLE] button, and it would create a new tag in the model. Or you can have a second option, which is to associate the hazard with one or multiple BIM objects, which is the BIM model.

For that, you can click on the first button to initiate the process. It will allow you to associate the hazard with this mapped object. But you can also add more object in relation with hazard. For that, you can click on this button, and it will add more object in relation with the hazard.

And the last button will allow you to remove objects from the hazard if you have made a mistake during your selection.

Finally, when object has been associated to hazard, you can view them by selecting the hazard in the table. And all the related BIM objects will be selected in the viewer.

The last part of this demo is the dashboard, which will allow the user to follow the progress and to have a better understanding of the hazard management system. On top of the dashboard, you will be able to view the project timeline and to have the list of all the project backups that have been done on the project. If you select one of these project backup, you will be able to view the dashboard at this specific date.

This will allow you to understand the progress that have been made during the project. On the top left corner, you will find all the information of the project. At the center, you will have the key figures as the number of the hazard in the project or the percentage of the processed hazards.

In the top right corner, you will have a quick overview of the distribution of the hazard status. Of course, the less open status you have, the better it is. And then the rest of the dashboard will give you more detailed information about the type of hazard that you have on your project, but also this distribution score of the hazard that have been assessed during the evaluation process.

And finally, the last three graphics are the distribution of the hazard across the different discipline of the project. The distribution of the hazard for the CSM, and the CDM hazard types.

So that's all for the SafebyBIM demo. I will let Eric to conclude this class.

ERIC PRUVOST: Thank you, Lucas. I hope you enjoyed the presentation. And now we are ready to answer your question during the Q&A session. Thank you.