FMJ Facilities Management magazine providing industry-specific intelligence to FM and property professionals
The use of drones and AI can help transform building fabric maintenance says Stefano Bensi, General Manager, SoftBank Robotics EMEA
The fabric of a building serves a crucial purpose for its occupants, in both a practical and a symbolic sense. First and foremost, it protects those inside from the elements and regulates the indoor environment, primarily through controlling the energy flow between the exterior and interior, especially important as extreme weather events become more frequent. But the fabric is also a visual representation of the building’s owner and occupants, an indicator of status and culture, and creates the first impression for visitors and guests. A building exterior that is well-maintained is more likely to inspire feelings of pride while showing the outside world you care. It’s all about ‘curb appeal’.
So, maintaining the building fabric must be a top priority. However, as with many things for which FM is responsible, it is taking on new, challenging dimensions all the time.
The overall rate of urbanisation may be slowing, but the world’s urban population is still estimated to rise to six billion by 2045, so governments and urban planners must act quickly to provide the infrastructure and services that cities need. For many urban areas across the globe, this means building upwards as well as outwards. According to a 2022 London Tall Buildings Survey, 109 skyscrapers are currently being built in the UK capital, 341 have received the go-ahead, and a further 71 have partial planning permission.
OUT WITH THE OLD
The increase in tall buildings highlights just how outdated traditional building fabric maintenance methods have become. There are undeniable safety risks. A typical manual inspection requires technicians to ascend (or descend if they’re starting from the top) a building using a pulley system. Indeed, workers dangling precariously on the edge of skyscrapers is a familiar – often scary – sight in major cities. And although ropes aren’t necessarily unsafe, accidents from these heights are almost always fatal.
This method is also labour-intensive, slow, expensive, and prone to human error. A skyscraper such as The Shard has an exterior surface area of 602,779 square feet (equivalent to eight Wembley football pitches). Performing a manual inspection of a building this size and height, and to do it effectively, takes a very long time. Technicians must identify a long list of potential defects to the building fabric, including surface cracks, corrosion, water marks, glass damage, loose components, premature performance issues and more, then document it all in preparation for future repair – and they must do it all often hanging hundreds of feet in the sky.
What’s more, manual fabric maintenance lacks geo-location accuracy no matter how trained the human eye. An alternative is to take inspection photos from the ground, but this method offers a weak vantage point and can easily miss defects on the building exterior, especially higher up and on the roof.
A GOLDEN THREAD
The good news is that technology is transforming building fabric maintenance. The capability now exists to perform façade inspections with AI-powered drone technology, making the process smarter and more accurate through a combination of data capture, artificial intelligence, and machine learning, and more efficient through automation.
Data plays a critical role in FM by providing the insights needed to optimise building performance, reduce costs, and enhance the occupier or customer experience. And the more data the FM team has, the more informed their decision-making about the maintenance, repair and replacement of assets, equipment, and systems will be.
Regulatory pressure is a significant drive for better data. The Building Safety Act, granted Royal Ascent in April 2022, has ensured that building owners and other built environment duty holders face greater scrutiny when managing building safety risks. Key to this is the creation of a ‘golden thread’ of building information through the lifecycle of higher-risk buildings. The new requires duty holders to keep up-to-date safety information regarding the design, build, and management phases. The UK government has confirmed that this golden thread must be captured and maintained digitally for the entire lifecycle of the building. A ‘paper’ trail is not enough.
Compliance is critical. Nobody wants to leave themselves open to legal or financial penalties. However, the benefits of a digital record of building data stretch way beyond regulatory pressures.
Historically, FM has struggled to collect, maintain, and manage data through the entire building lifecycle. As most facilities managers know all too well, the lack of information from the design and construction phase can lead to costly repairs or replacements once the building is live.
It’s a similar story during the operational phase. The cyclical nature of FM contracts sees multiple service providers come and go over short periods, often taking their knowledge and data with them. Most legacy technology platforms responsible for managing buildings also suffer from a lack of integration and interoperability, reinforcing the knowledge gaps between different duty holders as well as the potential for oversights and errors.
