University in bid to help cut delivery times

Dundee University is part of a £16 million project that looks to cut delivery times on major infrastructure developments.

The Transport Infrastructure Efficiency Strategy Living Lab (Ties Living Lab) was launched yesterday by minister of state, Andrew Stephenson.

Ties Living Lab is a collaboration aimed at harnessing the vast quantities of intelligence UK infrastructure projects generate, in order to drive down delivery times, reduce carbon emissions and improve safety and skills for construction workers.

Over the next two years, the partnership will invest more than £16m in new tools, processes and data systems – bringing together infrastructure and industry leaders with business and academic institutions to establish best practice in the way innovations are designed, built and integrated within transport assets.

Dundee will receive £264,000 to extract data from historic rail sector construction projects relating to cost, time, productivity and quality of work.

The team, led by the university’s civil engineering department, will then create metrics to benchmark the performance of a number of projects run by Network Rail and Transport for London.

Principal investigator Dr Moray Newlands said: “The Ties Living Lab project comes at a critical time for the UK construction industry.

“Client demands on cost, time and quality are now more important than ever and, to enable the industry to become more efficient, we need to examine historic data and identify where efficiencies can be made in new projects.”

The Dundee team will work alongside Whole Life Consultants Ltd, a university spin-out company which is led by Emeritus Professor Malcolm Horner, and Lean Construct Ltd, founded by Dundee alumnus Dr Steven Ward.

The Office of National Statistics will create a data store so others in the construction industry can use the data/ metrics they produce to measure performance of future projects and make the whole process more efficient.

Malcolm Horner.