The construction sector is responsible for almost a quarter of all workplace fatalities in the EU. Construction projects not only require a lot of human and machine labour, including highly complex tasks done in parallel, but also face harsh and ever-changing conditions involving heavy machinery, movement of construction materials, and an overall dangerous environment. These factors increase the risk of potential accidents as well as hamper the creation of truly responsive and resilient monitoring systems. Any ICT systems deployed on construction sites, including worker health monitoring systems, must protect themselves against the hostility of the environment, involving a lack of supporting infrastructure, extremely high E-M noise, vibration, and dust levels.

 

BUILD-DT aims to deliver concrete benefits for worker well-being by ensuring that any hazardous incidents are reported in a way that is fast, scalable, and resilient to the unpredictable conditions of construction sites. BUILD-DT will use the meta-OS layer of NebulOuS to add autoscaling and re-configuration capabilities to the pre-existing construction site digital twin used for worker health monitoring. The strong adherence to SLO compliance of NebulOuS will be utilized to make the system hyper-aware of its priorities expressed as critical application metrics. With these two crucial steps, the newly improved digital twin will have all the tools necessary to ensure stable functioning in the face of shifting conditions.

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Objectives and results

BUILD-DT focuses on enhancing the scalability and reliabity of a construction site digital twin system. Firstly, we will integrate NebulOuS orchestration and autoscaling functionalities, increasing the responsiveness and robustness of the digital twin. Elastic, SLO-aware deployment strategies will be added to the system and validated in a large-scale scenario involving edge devices, testing whether failures, node unreachability and workload spikes are handled correctly through fast resource reallocation. Secondly, BUILD-DT will strategically utilize the capabilities offered by NebulOuS to maintain low latencies for elements of the system most crucial for worker health monitoring. SLOs for maintaining low response time will be set for safety critical pipelines, such as worker fall detection. Thirdly, we will minimize resource utilization and the resulting costs incurred by the digital twin by downscaling the system when it can be safely done so without compromising uninterrupted services. Finally, BUILD-DT will maximize the social and operational impact of the advancements it achieves through communication with relevant stakeholders, diverse dissemination activities, and a well-defined exploitation strategy.

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To realize these objectives, BUILD-DT will extend an existing construction site digital twin, which was produced in the ASSIST-IoT Horizon 2020 project and augmented with NeverBlink’s technology. The twin serves as the foundation of a worker safety monitoring solution. BUILD-DT will particularly focus on 3 crucial pipelines of this solution: personal protective equipment (PPE) detection, fall detection, and health and safety assurance. Consequently, a wide selection of 5 different NebulOuS components will be integrated with the system. The components will add to the system autoscaling capabilities, such as dynamic workload load-balancing, adaptive cloud usage and automatic failover mechanisms.

 

The addition of NebulOuS capabilities is expected to result in the increased business value of the overall solution, making it more attractive for large deployments by industry partners. To ensure long-term sustainability, NeverBlink will not only invest in productizing the solution, but also release its selected components as open-source projects. Finally, the improved affordability and reliability of the digital twin, when combined with the integration of the widely used BIM model as its technological foundation, is expected to result in increased interest from construction industry partners. Moreover, BUILD-DT will deliver concrete benefits for worker well-being without compromising their rights by increasing OSH compliance in a privacy-preserving manner.

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Funding

BUILD-DT has indirectly received funding from the European Union’s Horizon Europe programme, via the NebulOuS Open Call #2 issued and executed under the NebulOuS project (Grant Agreement no. 101070516).​

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BUILD-DT's deliverables and public materials reflect only NeverBlink's views, and the European Commission or the NebulOuS project are not liable for any use that may be made of the information contained therein.

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