Mace and partners to develop control room concept to radically improve project delivery

Innovate UK has announced funding for a new ‘demonstrator’ project that will deploy a new production control room concept in some of the UK’s most complex and challenging projects.

The solution, called the ‘AEC Production Control Room’, will be led by Mace alongside a number of partners, UCL, Imperial College London, 3D Repo, Mission Room and eviFile. The team will develop and deploy a project control room system, built on live data feeds, that will radically improve the management and delivery of complex projects and programmes.

The project commenced in May 2020 with a duration of 24 months. The expert team was bought together to blend the best of academic insight and private sector delivery experience. It includes Mace, who will be leading and coordinating the project, academic input and support from researchers at UCL and Imperial College London, as well as private sector support from 3D Repo, Mission Room and eviFile.

Innovate UK has announced that the team have won £1.6m of funding to develop the concept. The demonstrator project is one of nine that have been announced as the next tranche of innovation funding delivered through the Government’s Construction Sector Deal.

The team will create a solution to help UK construction clients and contractors to be more efficient and proactive rather than reactive, with a scalable and repeatable ‘plug-and-play’ construction management and reporting platform known as the ‘AEC Production Control Room’.

Backed by I3P, the project team are currently in discussions with a number of the UK’s largest infrastructure clients to introduce the concept onto their projects to enhance visibility and oversight. The new concept fits closely with a full ‘Project 13’ approach to delivering projects and programmes, enabling ‘integrators’ to act more effectively.

Mark Reynolds, Mace Group Chief Executive, said:

"The Construction Sector Deal was designed to help the sector deliver transformative innovation, improving productivity and helping us deliver projects more effectively. This is a fantastic example of innovation funding doing exactly that.

“The project control room concept has the potential to improve decision-making through real-time visibility of data while delivering complex projects, something that could be transformative in the future. I look forward to working with our fantastic partners over the next two years to bring this concept to life.