OSArch Community

Possible project funding

1. C by carlopav on 30 Apr 2024, edited 20 Jul 2024 # +4 votes

   Hello, the 6 May there will be the second round of a call for projects to be fund by a consortium (https://www.consorzioinest.it/en/#content-1-en) that includes IUAV university in Venice Italy. The fund is targeted to north east italian companies in the field of AEC.

   In the first round of the call, we were able to setup a proposal that marginally includes also blendebim addon and IfcOpenShell, but i'll tell you more about that when the right time will come.

   The new proposal should be quite self contained and should be targeted to improve the sustainability of the AEC sector.

   As a suggestion the winning proposal of the first round were about: "predictive sensors in the field of historical heritage protection, the recovery of stone waste or polluted material to create new building materials, the treatment of soils subject to sea level rise to sustainable and nature-based energy solutions, as well as the development of innovative governance models for energy communities, the improvement of BIM systems dedicated to climate neutrality issues, the implementation of digital platforms dedicated to building site efficiency, the development of self-built and easily replicable solutions useful for fighting climate change".

   Obviously we will have to take a lot into account the targets of the companies that will eventually be involved, but at the moment there is at least space for a brainstorming ;)

2. M by Moult on 4 May 2024 # +3 votes

   Is there perhaps an opportunity for FreeCAD here? Ping @yorik.

3. Y by yorik on 4 May 2024 #

   is this call for projects only for north-east italian companies?

4. C by carlopav on 4 May 2024 #

   Yes, the funds are distributed by a consortium of local universities.

5. Y by yorik on 4 May 2024 # +3 votes

   in any case, if anyone wants to propose a freecad-based project, i'd be willing to help ;)

6. C by carlopav on 4 Jun 2024 # +4 votes

   Hello again! The first iNEST project is about to start and I'm still thinking about what we can candidate for the second run.

   I was chatting with @aothms and he suggested considering something related to spoke 9 (9. Models, Methods, Computing Technologies for Digital Twin), so I got in touch with the leading university in Trieste. I will summarize quickly the points that emerged (also if I havent yet clear what a DT is supposed to be in the AEC industry):

   • there could be 3 different approaches: A_construction of a specific digital twin, B_tools and methodologies to build digital twins, Cstandardization for digital twins ("at bSI they flirted a bit earlier with https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/digital-twins/concepts-models"_);

   • we know that the spoke already funded projects in the civil and infrastructure field, but the incremental gap of introducing a DT in architecture is smaller if compared to infrastructure ( Thomas pointed that "e.g a bridge deck was previously a "lifeless" thing and now you can wrap it completely with sensors for predictive maintenance. But building automation systems for e.g MEP have been thing for decades before DT was a thing." )

   Thomas correctly recalled me that: IFC is the "assembly language" of the AEC industry (i.e a derived low level language for execution, not a high level language for understanding). In order to make IFC useful in a digital twin, it should be easier to update, but more importantly it should relate more to the higher level functional intent of the building so that you can computationally assess/predict the consequences of events.

   And we are still struggling a bit with how that would deviate from the typical BAS https://www.se.com/us/en/work/products/building-automation-and-control/

   I was watching BimVoice channel yesterday with Petru interview to Erika Pärn about her new book, "Digital Twin Systems: The End of the Beginning." https://www.linkedin.com/events/7201121875144413184/. They distinguish between two different kind of DT: product and process... And talk about inteaction between different digital twins is the key...

   We would need a big player perhaps... I have some contacts with electrolux (that is present in the funded territory), but not for example with microsoft (that thomas suggested but it's outside of the funded territory).

   The keywords when talking about DT seems to be ‘monitoring’ and ‘predictive manteinance’

7. C by carlopav on 17 Jun 2024 #

   @aothms this are some companies I could try to reach out: https://www.niceforyou.com/en; https://www.came.com/us/; https://www.electrolux.it. Anyway still not clear what to propose them :) How does it sound?

8. A by aothms on 18 Jun 2024 # +2 votes

   I would say start with your contacts before you start cold calling. I'm not sure how to approach this either. It's not that we really have something to offer at this point (like we had BlenderBIM on the other project which gives awesome possibilities to jump start domain specific authoring). For DT it's more like we want move towards an architecture where we can treat the IFC model as a long lived database, but besides experiments we have not a lot to offer.

9. C by carlopav on 20 Jul 2024 #

   At the end I gave up and i did not submit any project for the second run of iNEST: too busy at work to be able to dedicate the necessary time to build the team. Thanks @aothms for the help and the advices, I'm everyday learning something new :)

   I'll keep eyes open on other chances that may arise.

Login or Register to reply.