Offsite Wood by QWEB: Advanced Panelization Group

There is a large gap between BIM practice communities and the supply chain for advanced panelization, one of most cost-effective and agile wood construction systems. Canadian shops are among the best in the world at this delivery model, but their optimization parameters are rarely presented clearly to the BIM practice community. In addition, many legacy BIM platforms have native functionalities and features that do not describe wood-based materials and methods.  A regional wood industry is not able to take the same approach to content delivery as more centralized and standardized industries are able to provide. Advanced panelization especially, will have different optimization for logistics, sizing, materials, and connection details in different Canadian regions. This problem has made it difficult to build parametric tools that can be easily updated to work across provinces, BIM softwares, and versions…especially when the project goals include free and open-sourced.   There are chronic inefficiencies in the translation to supply chain and fabricator software platforms. Even though the fabricator softwares are sophisticated, they are often working as late arrivals with many technical, practical, and even cultural limits on sharing their high LOD insights back to the project. Meanwhile, fabricator frustration with unreliable BIM model inputs has increased to the point where industry technical studios feel as if they are carrying a heavy burden of design development, leaving them further behind their shops’ automation and robotics improvements. The shared benefit of early-phase optimization tools will be to reduce this friction for the entire AEC to fabrication supply chain.

The solution that was developed, resolves challenges in three sequential digital workflows. First, the use of free libraries allowed the Offsite Wood website to build in standards rather than documenting them with complex protocols and guides. Industry consensus challenges are addressed with the ability to publish updates or regionally-specific templates, as we iterate and evolve BIM content offerings over time.  Seond, the use of a toolbar embedded within the architect’s desktop resolves some of the challenges of delivering knowledge to the actual digital technician who is not be accessing wood-specific educational resources offered to other AEC colleagues. The use of a plug-in also allows centralized updates and versions to be managed within a continually evolving ecosystem. The increased amount of inter-provincial trade was addressed with features that can take the form of a “regional pre-set”.  Third, the use of an Offsite Optimizer, allows early-phase projects to be suitably anonymized and “sent” to an online collaboration zone with dashboards for expert feedback from the panelization industry,  Architects do not have time or fee budgets to become framing experts.  Standard components need to be sensitive to regional requirements, and receive solutions that are sensitive to seismic, snow load, hurricane maps in addition to local material life cycle data, and local cost planning expertise. Because the Offsite Optimizer is owered by an open-sourced web-native platform (Speckle), it can bring together multiple software and non-BIM data experts, and update dynamic cost and carbon data.