In partnership with British Land and Amodal, Sensat has created a digital replica of the Canada Water Masterplan site in London.
The replica has taken all past, present, and future data of the 53 acre site and condensed it into one model.
This golden thread of information provides the missing link for overarching site accessibility, planning, and coordination for the scheme.
This ensures British Land and their delivery partners can better understand the site and its constraints to fast-track options appraisal process, feasibility reporting, and risk evaluations.
A partnership with Southwark Council, the £4bn project involves a new town centre for Southwark and London communities that complements the local area.
‘Smart planning’
As part of the Canada Water Masterplan, British Land selected Amodal and Sensat to provide a complete overview of the entire site, where multiple teams and project stakeholders can easily visualise site conditions remotely, supporting project decision-making, contingency planning and frictionless collaboration.
David Walters, British Land programme director, said: “The ability to both accurately scan the site, and confidently pull together lots of disparate data into one single platform, is amazingly powerful.
“The speed of iteration really helps for quicker options appraisal, more efficient handover processes, and better clash detection to reduce contingency costs. It’s been an invaluable resource when thinking through phasing.
“Adopting a Common Visualisation Environment® (CVE), such as Sensat’s, enhances our visualisation capability and has proven instrumental when it comes to data validation.
“By scanning the site using drones, and displaying this highly-accurate data in Sensat’s platform, we have been able to establish disparities between the actual locations of assets and their previously documented locations.
“Spotting problems early, ahead of the design phase, means we can significantly reduce the level of risk contingency costs, which could easily be into the millions.”
Amodal was commissioned by British Land to help translate the complexity of the project and all its building information and processes into the digital world.
Thomas Whiting, Amodal managing director, explained: “Organising all historical and current project information into a CVE takes having an oversight of the multiple data layers that make up a project, up to a new visual level.”
“Sensat was able to complement the data sets used on British Land’s existing software to enhance the visualisation and user functionality of current (and future) data sets”.
James Dean, Sensat chief executive, added: “The work has demonstrated how bringing all the right information together can really change the dynamic of a project for the better.
“A masterplan of this cost and scale could easily become fragmented, falling foul to misaligned incentives, behaviours and objectives, as well as delayed delivery timetables due to unreliable data, but we have helped overcome this and accelerate planning.
“It’s only when you see comprehensive information on existing assets, above- and below-ground utilities and infrastructure, as well as surveys and inspections, visually in one place that you can support collective problem-solving and mitigate the risks.
“We look forward to continuing to be a key enabler for smart planning to help partners build better and see the wider knock-on benefits this will have on other stakeholders linked to the masterplan.”
Image: Canada Water Masterplan (Credit: British Land)
Read next: Cadventure appoints Mike Clarke as information services director
Are you a building professional? Sign up for a FREE MEMBERSHIP to upload news stories, post job vacancies, and connect with colleagues on our secure social feed.
