BIM and CIM

At Cundall, we are committed to engineering and the progression that it can bring to our industry. Our Digital Engineering team works alongside our BIM Leads and Research and Innovation team to explore options for improvement within our teams and how we can apply this to our projects. Our approach to BIM is demonstrated by the Autodesk-accredited professionals in our team, and we use this knowledge as a base on which to develop.

Cloud-hosted project delivery

We are now fully utilising BIM 360 on all global projects. BIM360 is a cloud based software that has enabled us to perform cross company project collaboration on a global scale. This cloud platform brings together all project disciplines into one location to create the elusive ‘Single Source of Truth’! The cloud platform is built up from individual software modules to suit the needs of any size of project, and workflows can be bespoke to all project deliveries. Essentially BIM 360 and Autodesk Construction Cloud, is the common data environment that moves beyond a mere repository for storing files, and creates an interactive design and construction communication and collaboration software.

Design automation

We are continuing to develop and deploy computational BIM designbased workflows to enhance and further automate how we deliver projects to our clients. Our projects are frequently becoming more demanding and has pushed us to establish visual, systemic, and geometric relationships between the parts of our designs. The new processes have been developed by workflows that gets us from concept to result by way of rules. We are adopting an algorithmic approach to how we deliver projects. We undertake this defining step-by-step actions that follow a basic logic of input, processing, and output. Our new workflows allows our project teams to automate design tasks in a variety of BIM authoring platforms.

Bespoke Cundall tools

We have a digital in-house development team focused on the creation of tools and plug-ins to further enhance our digital practices. As an example, our newly developed ‘Document Manager’ tool can simplify the document creation process by automatically populating document numbers, names and other properties either using our standard ISO 19650 naming system or custom project naming conventions. This automatic property population combined with sorting, filtering and bulk editing tools greatly simplify document management. The software can also be linked with a Revit project to ensure that Revit sheets always keep up to date with correct numbering, titles and other properties.

Emerging technologies

In conjunction with Loughborough University we are currently developing an AI system that can generate a ‘Building Emissions Rates’ (BER’s) for non-domestic buildings in less than a second and with as few as 27 variables with little loss in accuracy, making it a faster and efficient process.

This uses a ‘decision tree-based ensemble’ machine algorithm, built and validated using 81,137 real data records that contain information for non-domestic buildings over the whole of England from 2010 to 2019. The data contained information such as building capacity, location, heating, cooling lighting, and activity. The system is to be further developed to build on the techniques to predict real operational energy consumption.

BIM & digital delivery

Cundall protocols and procedures are aligned to ISO19650 for all projects where possible. We understand ISO19650 and BIM are all about individuals working together. The performance of a team can be impacted if people don’t know their role.

To enable our global teams across Cundall to work together to manage information effectively, we have enrolled all our business leaders to undertake the ‘Information Management Practitioner’ certification through the Operam Academy to ensure our leaders have the capability and capacity needed to deliver successful projects. Earners of Operam Academy’s Information Management

Practitioner certification have the fundamental understanding of ‘BIM according to ISO 19650’.