The Open Systems Lab (OSL) team have been developing the digital platform, which aims to make it easier to adapt and replicate affordable, low-carbon housing based on H4.0E pilot models. The H4.0E Digital Platform will help contribute to the main project goal of reducing home building costs by 25% and carbon emissions by 60%. The platform allows the construction industry to optimise a building design based on key metrics for the structure, such as building cost, labour cost, mass and embodied carbon.
For the H4.0E platform to be able to replicate and customise house type designs it has to 'read' a variety of different building systems (from the pilots these include: closed panel timber, Insulated Concrete Formwork, post-and-beam, volumetric modules), and generate a reconfigurable 3D model based on the unique parameters of each system.
To put it simply, the platform does this by creating a number of grids within the building envelope-specific to the building system being used, and then automatically loads in the corresponding subassembly geometry from a building system database. OSL has utilised a series of 2D grids to do the heavy lifting rather, instead of individual parametric components, which requires a lot more processing time. This platform will allow a user to design a variation of one of the stakeholder’s building systems in the browser. It will also give real-time information about cost and embodied carbon metrics of the design.
