Evolution of architectural designs in the era of intelligent urban landscapes
In the ever-evolving landscape of construction and urban development, a crucial tool is emerging as a game-changer: Avolution's ABACUS. This comprehensive enterprise architecture modeling platform is revolutionising the way project teams and stakeholders manage the complexity of large-scale projects, particularly in the design and development of smart cities.
Comprehensive Modeling and Visualization
ABACUS supports creating detailed architecture models that represent all aspects of a construction project or smart city design, including infrastructure, IT systems, processes, and governance. This holistic view enables a clear understanding of the project, fostering efficient decision-making and collaboration.
Complexity Management
By capturing and linking diverse architectural elements, ABACUS helps identify dependencies, potential risks, and bottlenecks, making it easier to manage complexity and ensure all parts work together coherently.
Agile Governance and Real-time Insights
The platform supports agile governance practices by providing real-time visibility into project progress, risks, and outcomes. This is crucial for large, dynamic projects like smart cities that require adaptability and continuous monitoring.
Facilitation of Enterprise Transformation Cycles
ABACUS helps organisations transition from strategy to delivery within shorter timeframes by enabling data-driven decision-making and aligning technology with business goals.
Support for Professionals
ABACUS assists professionals in making informed EA decisions within complex projects, as evidenced by its association with project management and architectural roles in sectors such as urban development and technology management.
The Arup team, globally recognised for designing the digital built environment, is one such organisation leveraging the power of ABACUS. Principal consultant Robert Morgan, working in the digital group, is confident that planning using modeling software like ABACUS will become increasingly important in a world of cloud environments and outsourcing.
Practical Applications
Arup uses a suite of modeling tools, including ABACUS, to plan complicated integration projects with confidence. The information in the ABACUS repository is used to provide project management efficiency and details for design guides. The team can issue building contractors with a brief detailing the required systems and their integration.
ABACUS provides clarity about the total scope of IT required for a project and helps manage interconnected systems. Using catalogues in ABACUS, the Arup team rationalises complex IT systems to create an efficient architecture. The model can be used to provide details of assets, their locations, and how they are linked in infrastructure during the handover from builder to operator.
In practical applications, ABACUS has been instrumental in managing the complexity of modern construction projects. For instance, Arup has used ABACUS to create schedules of smart city services and the relationships with the hundreds of systems needed to deliver them.
Moreover, Arup has a smart city reference architecture captured in ABACUS, which can be tailored to meet the objectives and priorities of a project. This adaptability is particularly useful in addressing the problem of supporting quantity surveyors in estimating capital budgets for IT infrastructure and systems.
Traditionally, building systems, security systems, and fire systems were not considered as IT systems. However, with the advent of digital architecture, these systems can now be integrated, and their data made available for mining. This integration is facilitated by tools like ABACUS, enabling the creation of a unified, smart, and efficient urban environment.
In 2011, Arup used ABACUS to collate information, knowledge, and documentation for the 2012 Olympics handover to the London Legacy Development Committee. In 2013, the Arup team used ABACUS to map operational and business processes, and the underlying infrastructure, for a major UK airport operator's baggage IT asset replacement programme.
In conclusion, Avolution's ABACUS serves as an integrative tool that supports visualization, risk management, agile governance, and strategic alignment, making it essential for handling the multifaceted demands of modern construction projects and smart city initiatives. As digital architecture becomes as essential as physical architecture in the virtual world, the role of tools like ABACUS in shaping our cities and infrastructure will only grow more significant.
- As the digital world increasingly intertwines with physical construction, smart home devices and other gadgets found in home-and-garden infrastructure can be efficientlyintegrated into smart city projects thanks to platforms like ABACUS.
- With ABACUS, data from various smart home devices can be linked to the overall IT systems architecture, making it possible to mine the gathered data for useful insights and improvements in lifestyle, benefiting from advancements in data-and-cloud computing and technology.
- In the real-world applications of ABACUS, the unified smart city model can extend beyond traditional building, security, and fire systems to include smart home devices, thereby creating a coherent urban environment that enhances home-and-garden lifestyles for its residents.
