AEC Delta Mobility

• Project duration: February 2019 - July 2020
• Funder: InnovateUK
• Project members: Buro Happold, 3D Repo, Rhomberg Sersa Rail and UCL, Dr Eleni Papadonikolaki and Dr Dimitrie Stefanescu
• More details: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/bartlett/construction/research/management-projects/aec-delta-mobility
• Github: https://aecdeltas.github.io/aec-deltas-spec/

Project description:

The aim of this project is to engage manufacturing in the earliest possible stages of design by streamlining data workflow from consultants to factory. This is currently difficult due to proprietary file formats and commercial vendor lock-in causing significant overheads especially in design for manufacturing. Even though open standards such as IFC, COINS and BCF paved the way for collaboration, they are neither suitable for manufacturing nor scalable to large architectural and infrastructure projects. To address such shortcomings, we propose a novel open source micro-services web framework that will enable the industry to exchange individual object-level changes across various applications regardless of the underlying data format. Instead of exporting a whole file, our aim is to stream individual design changes (a.k.a. deltas) to whichever application is conformant with our newly proposed “AEC Delta Mobility” specification. The project aims to deliver open specifications and an open source reference implementation will to streamline the design processes for manufacturing, reduce delays and thus directly increase productivity on a wide variety of projects.