Over the past few years, the construction industry has entered an entirely new era through its convergence with technology—the age of ConTech. Born from the meeting of Construction and Technology, this innovation has brought tremendous change across the entire industry. Investment in ConTech startups is growing rapidly around the world, and the value of these companies is rising noticeably as well.
So what are the key technologies driving these rising ConTech companies? In this post, we'll take a look at the technology trends that make up ConTech.
One of the most notable technologies in the ConTech field is still BIM (Building Information Modeling). In fact, more than 73% of U.S. contractors actively use BIM, gaining clear benefits such as improving design accuracy and reducing the cost and time involved in construction.
BIM is a leading digital technology that generates and manages a wide range of information across the planning, design, construction, and maintenance phases. The information accumulated this way becomes a reliable basis for decision-making throughout a building's entire life cycle.
The key benefits of BIM include more efficient design, improved coordinate information, and time and cost savings. Furthermore, the advancement of BIM plays an important role in the development of digital twin technology.
Digital Twin, the latest trend in the construction industry, is a technology that converts physical objects into digital models to analyze and manage them. This makes it possible to predict and identify potential problems early and prepare the necessary responses in advance.
Digital twins deliver significant time and cost savings, along with a variety of strategic benefits such as automatic progress monitoring, more efficient facility management, building a 3D database of virtual assets, and collecting and recording data for AI.
The U.S. company GE (General Electric) can be considered the most advanced company when it comes to applying digital twins. It invested around one billion dollars in research and, in 2016, deployed Predix, the world's first industrial cloud-based open platform. Predix specialized in the benefits of industrial digital twins and was used in the aircraft engine management system of GE Aviation, a GE subsidiary.
The last construction technology we'll introduce is data collection and management using drones. Drones can fly on their own without an onboard pilot and are used at various stages, from building design to construction work. They can collect data and capture images faster and more accurately than people, and the information gathered this way is used together with the BIM mentioned earlier to convert two-dimensional data into three dimensions.
This technology makes it possible to supervise the progress of work at a construction site in real time. Even when an accident occurs, drones are filming the site from the air, providing great help in quickly identifying and rescuing injured people.
Meissa is bringing digitalization to construction sites using drones. It converts the two-dimensional data collected by drones into three dimensions, storing the information needed throughout the entire construction process on its platform and making it available to view at any time.
The digital transformation of the construction industry is now a necessity, not a choice. From BIM and drones to IoT, rapidly advancing technologies are making sites safer and more efficient. Amid these changes, the Meissa platform strives to help bring your smart construction even closer. For safer and more efficient construction, Meissa will be right there with you.
