It will use a hybrid steel and concrete structural platform that was developed as part of an Innovate UK First Phase Challenge Fund research project on Automated Construction.

Many, if not most clients, need designs that can respond to unique sites and needs e.g.for a healthcare facility the design needs to be flexible to accommodate specific clinical specialisms and the demographics of a particular region..

So how can a Reference Design both standardise a design, yet leave enough flexibility to adapt it to any given brief?.Designing flexible Reference Designs.In Reference Design, we create a core design of the most common of our clients’ facility type using a process of rationalisation, optimisation and standardisation.

At the same time, we attach a planned strategy for increasing or decreasing scale and content and how to flex to suit local conditions e.g.scale up or down to hit a particular brief.

rearrange or reconfigure to suit site constraints and layout.

choose between a ‘seismic’ or ‘non-seismic’ version.Ultimately, this means that many important uses for construction technology are being missed.

For example, we should be tracking how much movement there was in a column as it was being pulled in, and the bending.We need to be asking questions about how the concrete cured.

This type of work has an important impact in terms of predictive maintenance.If we understand exactly how the concrete cured and what went on in that process, we’ll know what stresses might be left in the building, thereby creating a long-term, high-value impact of that data.