Future Technologies Festival

Manisha Bhartia, our India studio leader was invited to moderate a session on InfraTech (technology in the infrastructure sector) as part of the Future Technologies Festival (FTF) organised by the British High Commission in New Delhi on 11 and 12 December. The festival was a thought leadership summit aimed at shaping the future for India-UK Tech Partnership and to drive trade, investment and partnerships. The session on InfraTech focused on UK advancements and innovation in construction and infrastructure development, including digital design and construction, BIM, and artificial intelligence, with a focus towards understanding their applicability, learnings and benefits for the Indian construction sector.

Speakers included Adam Matthews (Head of International, Centre for Digital Built Britain), Malcolm Taylor (Head of Technical Information, Crossrail), Alain Waha

(Global Lead for BIM, BuroHappold), Dev Amratia, (CEO nPlan), Rufus Logan (Commercial Director, India, BRE Group), Paolo Matteuzzi (Senior Associate Zaha Hadid Architects) and Nimish Gupta (MD South Asia, RICS).

 

The key points discussed were:

- adopting a standard model or language for BIM to allow working across continents

- the client’s role in driving forward the adoption of BIM in large scale projects

- the use of automation in engineering for repetitive and complex tasks in large scale building projects

- the use of artificial intelligence to learn from a large database of project schedules to highlight risks in any new project, and a discussion focused on whether data needed to be more open sourced

- the use of algorithms to create parametric architecture

- improving the skills of the existing labour force

- the applicability of BIM in the whole life cycle costing of a project.