Learning Legacy Podcast: Episode Five – How to swim in a sea of data
HS2 is one of the most complex and challenging railway scheme the UK has ever undertaken. As such, it has been generating vast amounts of data across the board. Every geological survey, every design, every site, every environmental survey, all generating more and more data.
So with all this data, what do you do with it?
The final episode of the Learning Legacy Podcast looks at how HS2 has been using their data to build more detailed models, advance approaches to work and better equipment that can provide greater insights into the world of construction engineering.
Featuring:
- Roberto Alberola – TYPSA, Head of BIM and Digital
- Peter Ruff – SCS, Head of BIM
- Jonny Neville – Mott Macdonald, Engineering Geologist and Information Manager
- Idarousse Mouhtar – BBV, Senior Materials Engineer
- Dr Anne-Marie Imafidon MBE – Social Entrepreneur and Computer Scientist
Roberto and Peter dive into the creation of a digital version of the project using Building Information Modelling (BIM) and ensuring there is a single point of truth so all designers and contractors along the length of the project are on the same page.
Jonny and Idarousse talk through the process of earthworks excavation by using a new 3D GeoBIM model which allows for more advanced ground investigation surveys. Further pushing the importance of the planning process before putting a spade in the ground.
Dr Anne-Marie closes out the series with an extract from her speech given at HS2’s Learning Legacy Live event. Highlighting having a growing mindset, experimenting along with learning from our actions and asking “how” we do things.
Find out more about HS2’s Learning Legacy Programme
Learning Legacy papers featured in this episode
- Towards a Digital Blueprint: data, technology and collaboration at the core of HS2
- Driving efficiency and sustainability in material reuse through GeoBIM
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Episode transcript
This is a transcript of episode one of HS2’s Learning Legacy podcast, first published on 28 March 2023.
Rhian Owen
Every project, big and small, generates data. And efficiencies can be made all throughout a project’s life, from design, to construction right through to operation, if the data is captured, analysed and effectively used.
HS2 is one of the most complex and challenging railway initiatives the UK has ever undertaken, and it has been generating vast amounts of data. Every geological survey, every station design, every construction site, every environmental survey, all generating more and more data. And since the very beginning HS2 has been using this to build more and more detailed models that can provide greater insights into the construction and the process as it’s going on.
Roberto Alberola 00:47
I think the important bit is to understand that nowadays, virtually any human activity is related to or has some data associated to it. So there’s data everywhere, when you wake up in the morning, and you move around, and you go to work or you do whatever you do. So it’s understanding that when you design, when you build, when you plan, there’s also data that you need to use.
Rhian Owen
Hello, I’m Rhian Owen, and welcome to the HS2 Learning Legacy podcast. In this 5 part mini-series on HS2’s Learning Legacy programme, we’ve been looking at the lessons engineers and others have learned as they work on the project.
HS2 is the largest construction project in Britain, with around 30,000 jobs supported by the project and over 3,200 UK-based businesses helping to build it. Not only will HS2 provide better journeys and boost economic growth, the construction of the project will leave a legacy of knowledge and innovation for the wider industry to learn from.
In this final episode we are unravelling the complexities of Building Information Modelling, or BIM. We uncover how BIM isn’t just about constructing buildings but revolutionising how we manage built assets, setting the stage for a new era of innovation.
We’ve just heard from Roberto Alberola, Head of BIM and Digital for TYPSA, a design company that has been working on HS2 since 2016.
Roberto along with Peter Ruff, Head of BIM at SCS, authored the Towards a Digital Blueprint: data, technology, and collaboration at the core of HS2 learning legacy paper. From the early days of the HS2 project Roberto and Peter have been helping to create a digital model of the entire project using BIM.
Roberto Alberola 02:40
So although it says Building Information Modelling is not so much only about buildings about constructing, it’s about managing built assets, not necessarily buildings. I think, for me, the most interesting part is the methodology side of BIM. So BIM is the methodology of essentially doing the same thing we’ve been doing for a long time, but in a different way, with a different method. So basically, it’s understanding that a project or programme is not based on documents, it’s more based on data. It’s more based on information, it’s about having all the information related to that project connected to each other, and being consistent. And when we say model it’s not only the 3d model side of it, it’s also the virtual representation of the built asset and how the performance can be analysed before it’s built.
Rhian Owen
When Roberto and Peter joined the project there was already an overwhelming amount of data to work from.
Peter Ruff 03:48
You know, there was lots of items that had been collected previously, like, for example, the borehole information, which is important if you’re doing tunnelling, if you’re doing anything geotechnical, survey information around the line that could be that could be, you know, there was a topo-surveys, the toposurveys point clouds and the like, existing assets, you know, we’re kind of a lot of, at least down here in London, we’re kind of trying to put a line into existing, basically put something straight into London infrastructure, which is difficult, it’s very Brownfield, there’s lots of existing assets with an interfaces with Network Rail, and London Underground and TfL. So we had a lot of asset information come from those guys, lots of utilities as well, you have to think about where all the or where all the existing mains are, and stuff like that, to make sure that your design complies with that. There’s a huge amount of existing information, which was given to us at the beginning of the project.
Rhian Owen
Up and down the length of HS2, there are different designers and contractors, and it was the job of the digital team to make sure everyone was on the same page.
Roberto Alberola 04:48
So, it’s all at the end, it’s all around data, it’s how we pull data and how we move data between systems, from one place to the other to serve the purpose of each one of the teams, there are many, many teams involved, working at the same time, each one each one in their own developing their own scalability, but they’re pulling from the same source of data.
Rhian Owen
Having one single point of truth or a common data environment allows everyone to work from and analyse the latest version of designs. And this is particularly important for a project the scale of HS2 which is dealing with over 7 million points of data.
Roberto Alberola 05:28
So not having people wasting time looking for stuff or not, I mean, the old is this is this updated, iIs this the latest one, so now we have a system that tells you this is the latest one, or if there’s anything they later, access information, how to coordinate how to collaborate one, one team, again, with all the using the same the same data, the same information for all them.
Rhian Owen
Ensuring everyone is working from the latest designs can create big efficiency savings, especially as these designs can then be tested digitally for compliance.
Roberto Alberola 06:02
So, you can ensure that the solution that you’re designing is compliant, how to do those checks, or the consistency of information that also saves a lot of time, the idea of pre constructing, before constructing of simulating, or analysing the performance of an asset, before it’s built, that saves a lot of programme because it highlights maybe the construction sequence could be done in a different way improved, that saves time and saves money, of course, also the mistakes or errors that we may find when we’re building something, if you highlight them beforehand, when you have the chance to design it differently, or to build it differently with different methods that also saves time.
Rhian Owen
When the Government first agreed to HS2, the Department for Transport set a target for the digital team, that £500 million would be saved on the cost of the project through digital modelling.
Peter Ruff 07:03
It was a number that was set by HS2 when they were talking to DFT. It was an ambitious target, I would say, but it’s probably quite light, actually, when you consider what efficiencies could be, could be achieved. In terms of the project itself, the biggest ones would actually be probably just the use of like your common data environment to surface up information in a consistent manner that is worth a huge, a huge amount of money in terms of efficiencies of staff accessing stuff, not making mistakes, which is a big one we you know make not making errors and not having to do rework and stuff like that.
Rhian Owen
But HS2 has taken it further than what was initially required through discussions with DfT. It has developed the 5D+ concept of BIM.
Peter Ruff 07:49
Essentially the extra Ds are for when we just add extra processes essentially, into that modelling aspect that we spoke about. So with 4D, that’s about the time aspect. So that’s about when you simulate, or virtually construct things before they actually occur. It’s a very powerful tool to de-risk the build.
Rhian Owen
This approach allows the team to design complex plans that can be tested and proven out before construction begins. But the digital team wanted more information so they added a fifth D.
The fifth D accounts for the cost implications of a project.
Peter Ruff 08:25
The fifth D, it’s got different connotations. But the way that we approached it on this job is more about improving how we estimate and how we cost jobs.
Rhian Owen
But again, the HS2 digital team wanted to go beyond just cost estimations, so they created 5d+.
Peter Ruff 08:45
During that, we kind of coined the 5D+, which was about doing our carbon at the same time. Because we know that from an environmental point of view, it’s a big, it was definitely a big deal to HS2, and a big deal to the government, in general. And we’ve got quite robust carbon targets on the project. So again, we kind of worked out that when you were working out costs and quantity, you can work out your carbon pretty much quite effectively at the same time.
We got involved in what’s called early contractor involvement. So ECI. And I’ve always said that actually is really, really good from a digital point of view, because it allowed us to kind of work in concert with the designers upfront to set things up in a very quite mature way I would suggest, so I definitely would recommend to anyone looking into doing one of these again, ECI is I found it very, very helpful
Rhian Owen
And the digital team was set up in a way to maximise collaboration with contractors across the project.
Peter Ruff 09:40
In terms of our teams, actually, I mean, we took the approach of having a combined team, which was quite novel at the time I would suggest, so we just had a BIM team, it was made up of individuals from all of the parties involved, actually. And I think that also led to some, hopefully, good efficiencies, I was suggesting, and quite a good team bond.
Rhian Owen
Early contractor involvement gave the digital team, designers and contractors a head start on getting their plans ready for construction.
But before any of that could begin there was already vast amounts of geological surveying and earthworks that needed to be done.
Across the length of phase one, 21 million cubic metres of earth, or 8,400 Olympic sized swimming pools worth of material needed to be moved.
With a commitment to reduce carbon emissions by 50%, and the earthworks identified as one of the largest sources of carbon emissions, the earthworks team looked to find a new approach that could cut their emissions, costs and time.
Determining what the ground is going to consist of before you dig it up is no easy task, and even getting an estimate of the ground material takes decades of experience.
Jonny Neville 10:50
It’s kind of very subjective. And I think the key is, it actually requires quite a lot of experience sometimes, and a big project, that takes a lot of experienced people to do it, which is time consuming and costly. And it’s, as you say, the best estimate is quite a qualitative assessment in the past. And it was on kind of that expert judgement, in inverted commas, and that we would use. So it was good, and it served the purpose but it wasn’t quantitative. It was very much a finger in the air, almost. Those fingers in the air were probably pretty close to reality, but it was quite a time consuming process.
Idarousse Mouhtar 11:36
When you get onto a job, the first thing we ask is, do we have enough material to build. And to do that, we will be looking at the geometry of the cutting, and then try to assess. I have to say it’s a bit of a guess, some geologist will say “maybe this represents 80%”. The other one might say “No, no, no, no, for me, it’s 60%”. And then after you put the geotechnical data in front and assess in regard to the specification, what can and what can be used, that takes a lot of time, it needs a lot of interpretation.
Rhian Owen
Jonny Neville is a senior engineering geologist and Idarousse Mouhtar is a geotechnical engineer with joint contractor BBV. They are part of the team who wrote the Driving efficiency and sustainability in material reuse through GeoBIM learning legacy paper.
Understanding what material is beneath your feet before you start excavating is important for two reasons. Firstly, to understand how easy it will be to excavate and remove the material from site, and secondly to assess the potential for reusing the excavated material.
HS2 is a project in material deficit. This means it needs more material for fill than they will excavate from cuttings.
So using the material they excavate as efficiently as possible provides important cost, material, environmental and time savings.
Jonny Neville 13:02
Really simply, when it’s above existing ground, we need to put some fill on top of it to get to that level. And that would be our fill that we need to put something and then anything below ground is cut. And we’re excavating. And essentially, we’re trying to balance that. So anything that’s either below ground is a cut or a tunnel, that will be material that we will have to place somewhere else.
Rhian Owen
So instead of simply going in and starting the earthworks, Johnny wanted there to be a detailed plan of how the earthworks would be done.
First they chose the earthworks sites that they suspected would have the most complex geology to do further assessment.
Idarousse Mouhtar 13:39
And we select them based on the geological complexity of each cutting. When it’s simple, we have one or two geologies and it’s relatively flat. No difficult geological features. You don’t need to do very complicated things to get your assessment. But we had some serious areas where it has been complicated and guessing wasn’t permitted. That’s why we went through that route.
Rhian Owen
They chose two sites to trial the new 3d GeoBIM model. These sites then had additional data collected to be fed into a 3d geological model, which consisted of topography data, ground investigation data and the design models.
To conduct the ground investigation surveys, they had to decide on a level of detail required which was dependent on the geological complexity.
One of those sites with complex geology, is the Offchurch Cutting, which required a million cubic metres of excavation and was a complicated mix of Mercia Mudstone, rock, glacial deposits, and soil.
Jonny Neville 14:46
What we identified through the modelling was that there’s 10% more glacial deposits than we initially were predicting. And 10% more glacial deposits from 1 million is 100,000 cubic metres. Now glacial deposits, it was either a decrease of glacial deposits or Mercia mudstone so it’s 10% More glacial deposits than otherwise would have been Mercia mudstone.
Rhian Owen
Knowing what material you will be excavating before earthworks begin allows you to plan what you will do with the material.
Every material is classified using the UK Specification for civil engineering works, series 600.
Jonny Neville 15:23
It’s quite simple data is plasticity data. It’s moisture, content, data, it’s sulphate data, it’s data that Mouthar is very familiar with and then any contractor is right. Anyone involved in Geotechnics, these are kind of almost, they’re classified as index tests, a lot of these things. And so you’re just you’re literally just identifying the base characteristics, we capture this, and we report it. So in terms of the source data, there’s nothing new there. I think the bit we’re adding on to it is that 3d visualisation aspect.
Rhian Owen
Investigating ground material and condition all standard as part of earthworks, but HS2’s 3d model allows the earthworks team to know not just what the material is but precisely where it is located.
Jonny Neville 16:25
So before we had the data, and we were probably using it to create statistical models and understand statistically, that you have, let’s say, 70% of your cutting, you might know is a class two material, but what you would not know is where that 70% of that material is. So what’s very hard is kind of, you might have 70% of class two, but it was all mixed in and it’s all mixed together, you’re not actually going to be able to separate it out.
Rhian Owen
All this data on the materials in the ground as well as the 3d model shows exactly where the deposits are.
And this model was used to create a plan to excavate and reuse material as efficiently as possible, in terms of time, cost and carbon savings.
Mass haulage movements were optimised using the data from the 3d model. Teams undertaking excavations were able to target areas with material that was required for construction taking place nearby.
But mass haulage is not the only area where time and carbon can be saved. Huge carbon savings can be found in how you treat the material to make it usable.
Class 7 material needs to be lime treated to unlock its potential for construction applications.
Jonny Neville 17:37
Lime has a carbon and body carbon value of about four times higher than other fields. So it’s really significant when you blow it up to the kind of 25 million metres cubed of material that we’re going to be moving. And if you can save adding lime into even a third of that the carbon adds up quite quickly.
Rhian Owen
The site for the Offchurch Cutting was initially assumed to be a mix of Class 2 and Class 7 material, and it would be difficult to extract one from the other.
Jonny Neville 18:08
We initially had planned to like treat the whole material that would come from that cutting
Rhian Owen
But when the 3d spatial assessment was done, it showed that actually, the class 2 and class 7 materials were separated and could be extracted independently.
Despite initially assuming that all the Offchurch cutting material would need to be lime treated, the assessments showed that only half of it would need it, resulting in significant carbon savings
Jonny Neville 18:34
I think that was about 16,000 tonnes of carbon alone there saved. Now that’s only one cutting, so you could start scaling that up across all the 30-40 cuttings, we’ve got and get really big numbers. Now, of course, you’re not gonna get the savings of that on everyone. But that’s the kind of thing that was popping out when we did a kind of rough assessment.
Rhian Owen
But it’s not just carbon savings, as Johnny mentioned earlier, the 3d spatial assessment at Offchurch revealed more 10% solid glacial deposits than expected.
Jonny Neville 19:05
The benefit of glacial deposits is you can get class one from the sands there and also it is normally much wetter, so you don’t have to add water into it, which can be often as an environmentally unfriendly and time consuming process there. So from this particular cutting we, I think it was about it was some ridiculous number like 10 million litres of water that we managed to reduce just because it was glacial deposits not having to bring more water into put into the Mercia mudstone.
Rhian Owen
After the success with the Offchurch cutting this technique was implemented across 17 different cuttings with sufficiently complex geology.
And so far with optimised mass haulage, enhanced material reuse strategies, and the reduction of lime treatment from 2.5% to 1.5% across those sites, the north section of phase one has had a 50% overall reduction in carbon footprint during the project’s earthworks.
By embracing new technologies and adopting a data driven approach, HS2 has not only achieved savings in time, cost and carbon, but also positioned itself as a catalyst for innovation across the UK construction industry, and all that information is being made freely available through the learning legacy project.
Jonny Neville 20:25
I think you can forget that we’re in this HS2 bubble sometimes where the amount of innovation that’s going on, you just started to think it’s just normal. And you can sometimes forget how innovative some of this stuff is. I know from reading some of the technical papers for other aspects of the geotechnical world, I’ve learned a lot and there’s some other fantastic things going around. So just sharing that wider is really important.
Peter Ruff 20:55
I think there’s definitely been a lot of lessons learned over the last few years. And again, it’s been interesting to kind of be involved for such a long time and see how things have shifted. I think you have to use some of these techniques on big projects. There’s no I don’t see, for example, with that common data environment, I don’t see how you can ever go back on that, especially when you’re working with 1000s of people. HS2 attracts a lot of international interest. And both Roberto and I have spoken to, you know, clients over in, in Europe, in Australia, in the States about what he has to have done, because they’re interested in taking some of the lessons learned. And I guess when we sort of we had the mantra of the digital blueprint, it was just trying to, I guess, turn the dial a little bit on the projects, you know, make sure that we we learned the lessons from maybe other mega infrastructure projects. The founding principle was always to try and, as I said, use the blueprint and, and share knowledge. So you know, and stuff like the learning legacy is a great way of doing that.
Roberto Alberola 22:11
I mean, it’s a good story. We said, okay, there’s a good story here, we can tell a good story. And it’s good for everyone. It’s not for us, it’s for everyone to have a good story. Anyone can learn from this as we’ve learned.
Rhian Owen
We would like to wrap up this Learning legacy series by hearing part of the keynote speech from the first HS2 Learning Legacy live event that took place in October 2023.
The event had talks from authors of learning legacy papers and was attended by their colleagues and counterparts from across HS2 and the wider industry.
The keynote speech was given by Dr Anne-Marie Imafidon. Dr Anne Marie was the youngest student to pass A-level computing aged just eleven, at 20 she received her masters degree in mathematics and computer science from the University of Oxford.
Since then she has worked in the tech sector, the financial sector, and received Honorary Doctorates from eight different universities, but she spends most of her time working on the social initiative she co-founded, Stemettes.
Dr Anne-Marie Imafidon 23:13
We work with young people aged five up to 25 to encourage and inform them with the stem industry, being science, technology, engineering and maths but also steam, which is science, technology, engineering, arts and maths, it’s very important to bring all of them together. And over the last 10 years, we’ve worked with more than 60,000 young people.
Rhian Owen
Thank you for listening to this mini-series on HS2’s learning legacy programme. Let’s close out with some advice that Dr Anne-Marie gave the audience, on how we can all leave a lasting legacy.
Dr Anne-Marie Imafidon 23:46
So I wanted to close by giving you kind of maybe five tips, five things
that I hold on to that I hold dear, that has been helpful in leaning into that legacy.
Creating, curating and sharing what lessons are learnt. But also being able to reflect and be open to saying yeah, things have gone wrong.
Firstly, is to have a growth mindset. And a growth mindset means that you are constantly stepping just outside of your comfort zone. It means that you want to know more this week than you knew last week, or more this month than you knew last month, more this year than you knew last year. So a really interesting and easy one perhaps to do on the technical side. Of course, there’s always a new version, right? There’s always a new iteration, there’s always something else. But how can we do that in terms of the learning and the understanding of our impact of our legacy?
And from this platform, this gift of a platform that you have: How are you going to ensure that actually, over time, I want to keep stepping just outside of my comfort zone, I want to keep doing things that are slightly difficult. And I want to keep noting down what those lessons are to have been learned. So having a growth mindset means you step just outside your comfort zone, because that’s where the magic happens in those lessons.
Secondly, is to be experimental. This idea of experimentation, and constantly being in a loop of experimentation has set me and others I know who are constantly learning lessons up in good stead. It means that everything is an experiment. You’re always building, measuring, learning and then coming back again. You’re always open. When it’s an experiment. You have an hypothesis. You don’t know if it’s right or if it’s wrong. If you do know that, it’s not an experiment. But we’re setting it up on a circle. We’re going to come back, we’re going to reflect on it, we’re going to learn and we’re going to go from making very simple mistakes to making really high quality mistakes. We don’t continue to make the same mistakes, we make new mistakes.
And we really do further knowledge in a way that’s incredibly powerful, but also for you, as a manager, as a leader, for you as a grad or someone else that’s coming up, being able to be in that series of experimentation is also going to set you up to really take advantage of all the new exciting things that come as we hurtle towards the future.
Third, is to be intentionally inclusive, always otherwise, you’re unintentionally exclusive. There are lessons to be learnt in all corners, from all manner of folks from all manner of perspectives. It’s not just the principle, was not just the person that already knew everything. There are small micro lessons, there are macro lessons.
Second to last is that the visibility of our lessons matters. And it takes a lot of courage that can be reinforced by the right kind of culture, which I believe that you might have by the presence of this platform, but actually getting comfortable with noting these things down, sharing them, talking them through building on them, is a big part of it. We have failure parties in my teams quarterly, say to everyone, what’s something that went wrong this quarter? Let’s talk about it.
And then finally, there’s something in recognising the sphere of influence that you do have, not just in a platform like this, but in the way that you do projects, the way that you engineer, the way that you lead, the way that you collaborate with others around those lessons that are learnt. So recognise and use that influence you owning up to something you being able to share, you re-sharing and building based on the lesson that’s come from someone else. There’s something magical actually in being able to do that.
Credits
Rhian Owen
I’ve been your host Rhian Owen. Thanks to our guests Roberto Arbeloa, Peter Ruff, Jonny Neville, Idarousse Mouhtar, and Dr Anne-Marie Imafidon.
You can get more details on the topics featured in this series by taking a look at the HS2 Learning Legacy website. We provided links in the episode description.
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