The consortium of Laing O'Rourke(LOR), Tony Gee and Partners, and the Laing O'Rourke Centre's CIT group at the University of Cambridge has been selected for an award of £1,2 mil for Digitally Enabling the Design for Manufacture, Assembly and Maintenance (DfMA) of Bridges by the UK Technology Strategy Board.
This grant is trying to address a major challenge in the infrastructure sector; the supply of bridges is not commoditised in the UK. Bridges are largely designed as bespoke solutions with the majority of the work being carried out on site. Moreover, workers are exposed to hazards since they have to work at elevated heights and spend time near high traffic volumes. When improving and/or replacing existing bridges, disruption through lane closures and detours is common. This project aims to tackle the problems above through an integrated digital delivery process for bridges and bridge parts that will address their whole lifecycle from identification and rationalisation of needs to manufacture, assembly, operation, maintenance and decommissioning.The output will be an interoperable set of digital tools, data schema and virtual prototyping processes that will lead to the automated manufacture of a set of standardised, validated parts and sub-assemblies at a controlled price, configured virtually, and in reality capable of meeting the requirements of the most common bridge types.
This will unlock and leverage the expertise in virtualizing and monitoring infrastructure of the CIT group and the investment made by LOR in Computer Aided Advanced Manufacturing through creation of a demand for offsite manufactured bridge parts and assemblies and allow digitally driven advanced manufacturing processes to be applied to bridge delivery. The project will provide a transformative change in the way we design, build, operate and decommission bridges, accelerate delivery and improve the industry’s safety record by moving significant amount of work off-site.