Daniel Hall
ETH Zurich
Prof. Dr. Daniel M. Hall is Assistant Professor of Innovative and Industrial Construction at ETH Zurich. He seeks to enhance governance, productivity, and innovation in the construction industry through a transformation from fragmented project delivery methods to new organizational models that integrate the supply chain. Prof. Hall is also the founder and lead organizer of the annual Industrialized Construction Forum at Stanford University, next held in February of 2019. He holds a PhD and MS in Civil and Environmental Engineering from Stanford University, and a BS in Architectural Engineering from California Polytechnic State University San Luis Obispo.
The current digital ecosystem in Architecture, Engineering and Construction (AEC) typically begins with BIM for architectural design and gives little consideration for the required fabrication and assembly activities that occur later in the supply chain. The fundamental data structure of initial 3D models does not match with information required by advanced fabricators. Projects that seek advanced production or assembly methods must coordinate several significant data conversions. However, even with relatively standardized building components, interoperability between different BIM authoring tools is insufficiently resolved as it often results in data loss and transformation. This is notably problematic when considering how to accurately integrate emerging industrialized construction technologies such as offsite building, prefabrication, digital fabrication, and advanced robotic assembly.
The future of industrialized construction lies in creating a digital, cloud-based platforms that act as the underlying computational engine for advanced manufacturing and assembly. These platforms act as ‘configurators’ that embed constraints for industrialized construction technologies into the upstream design studio. Simultaneously, the configurators have upstream interfaces that can be linked using APIs to design software.
Using this digital platform, industry practitioners can design and implement bespoke solutions from the same software interface they use for the rest of their project design. This has broad reaching implications for AEC, including a shift in mindset from BIM files as an input (i.e. the initial .rvt or .ifc file that informs the rest of the project) but rather as the output (i.e. the result of rule-based configurations within the platform) that is useful for software in the ecosystem but does not require data conversion as the file passes down the supply chain.
This talk will begin with a basic overview of what AEC platforms are and how they enable industrialized construction. The talk continues with the difference between the development of internal platforms within vertically-integrated companies and the development of industry 4.0 cloud-based digital ecosystems. Industry examples of successful design-for-manufacturing-and-assembly platforms that are currently ongoing (e.g. ProjectFrog and Autodesk) will be described, as well as future research directions for platform-based thinking (e.g. COMPAS platform from the National Center of Competence in research (NCCR) Digital Fabrication at ETH Zurich). The talk will conclude with a proposed framework for a future digital ecosystem for AEC that is enabled by cloud-based platforms and configurators.
