Ming Shan Ng, Charmaine

Achieving the SDGs requires complementary actions in every country. Digital transformation is one promising way. This work investigates design for digital transformation that includes digital fabrication adoption in the architecture, engineering and construction sector to achieve SDGs, with examples from the Japanese construction industry.

Introduction

Society, industries, science and businesses are urging to take complementary actions for a transformational change around the globe. The World in 2050 initiative (TWI2050, 2018) consolidates transformation in six key domains for countries to collaborate in developing pathways to implement the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). They six key domain include human capacity and demography, consumption and production, decarbonisation and energy, food, biosphere and water, smart cities and digital revolution. These six transformations shall “interact essentially with all the SDGs” and provide pathways to achieve all SDGs to different extents in ways that can be managed, depending on infrastructure including governance, values, policy tools (TWI2050, 2018).

Amongst all six transformations, digital transformation is constituted by the emerging technologies in Artificial Intelligence (AI), digitalisation, robotics, digital fabrication (including additive and subtractive manufacturing), reality technologies, as well as blockchain and the Internet of Things (IoT). It can be seen that digital transformation disrupts production processes in every sector of the economy, including the architecture, engineering and construction (AEC) sector in the industry. Benefits of digital transformation include the increase of productivity and accessibility, reduction of production costs and material consumption (TWI2050, 2018). Recent scholarship examines digital transformation practices to achieve each SDG from an over-arching perspective. For example, Sachs et al. (2019) studies the relationship between all six transformations and the 17 SDGs based on a literature review. Amongst all the SDGs, digital transformation shows to have the closest relationship with SDG 9 – Industry, innovation and infrastructure, in particular, to facilitate research and development to foster innovation and adoption of technologies. Vinuesa et al. (2020) explores digital transformation through the adoption of AI to enable or inhibit SDGs based on literature. Digital transformation can achieve the targets under each SDG through various practices including resource optimisation in design/planning and through data monitoring systems, thorough waste management in water and on land, as well as local community and values improvement.

Digital Transformation (DX) and Green Transformation (GX)

Amongst all industries, the construction industry is one of the largest exploiters of resources, with half of them being non-renewable. It accounts for 38% of total global energy and process-related CO₂ emission, where half of all emissions are embodied in buildings caused by the materials manufacturing process and the construction process (WBCSD, 2021). Also, it is estimated that the industry consumes 40% of raw stones, gravel and sand, as well as 25% virgin wood per year. Also, the industry contributes to 50% of landfill wastes, 40% of drinking water pollution and 23% of air pollution. While many other industries such as the agriculture and the automobile industries have transformed themselves with lean principles and extensive automation adoption; the construction industry still relies on traditional methods for projects with highly fragmented supply chain, extensive and yet glacial regulations and contractual structures, as well as very low investment in digitisation and innovation (Barbosa et al. 2017). The supply chain and the corresponding management models play a crucial role in the future emissions of buildings.

However, there is still little research that explores how the AEC sector in the industry can design for digital transformation to achieve SDGs in practice. In summary, the sector requires transformations – Digital Transformation (DX) and Green Transformation (GX) to foster cleaner construction and digital revolution for sustainable development to achieve the SDGs in the aspects of the environment, economy and society (Cato, 2009). This work aims to fill the gap by identifying the related practices that can achieve the 17 SDGs based on the literature and to investigate how they achieve sustainable development regarding the framework ofpeople, process and technology framework (Prodan et al., 2015), as well as the three pillars of sustainability – economy, society and environment as shown in Figure 1 Moreover, this work validates the findings with examples from the Japanese construction industry through case studies in Japan.

Digital transformation practices in the AEC sector

Figure 1_ A tripartite diagram presenting 27 digital transformation practices in the architecture, engineering and construction (AEC) sector for achieving the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) under the holistic improvement framework of people, process and technology – and the three pillars of sustainability – economy, society and environment. Data adapted from TWI2050 (2018), Sachs et al. (2019) and Vinuesa et al. (2020). SDG colour courtesy of UN/ SDG.

On one hand, this work shows that the practices conduct predictions to make better plans of action and optimise resources in design and planning can achieve ten SDGs. The practice conduct predictions to make better plans of action includes climate change forecasts using urban and land information. This can help to address several targets such as SGD 13.1 target – Strengthen resilience and adaptive capacity to climate-related hazards and natural disasters in all countries. The practice optimise resources in design and planningincludes optimisation of design and resilience of infrastructure, buildings and construction, as well as promotion of resource efficiency and the use of renewables in the early planning phase, which can assist to address several targets such as SDG 9.1 target – Develop quality, reliable, sustainable and resilient infrastructure to support economic development and human well-being, as well as SDG 8.4 target – Improve progressively, through 2030, global resource efficiency in consumption and production and endeavour to decouple economic growth from environmental degradation. Besides, the practice optimise resources in consumption through data monitoring is found to achieve eight SDGs; while the practices thorough waste management and invest in digital technologies and infrastructure are found to achieve seven and six SDGs respectively.

On the other hand, this work shows that SDG 11 – Sustainable cities and communities and SDG 12 – Responsible consumption and production can be enabled by 11 practices. This can be seen by the orange edges linking from SDG 11 on the right column to the practices on the middle column, and the brown edges linking from SDG 12 to the middle column as shown in Figure 1. For example, one practice that can achieve SDG 11 is through the practice of facilitate Research and Development (R&D) to foster innovation and adoption of technology. SDG 12 can be enabled through the practice foster circularisation and enable circular economy. This is followed by SDG 8 – Decent work and economic growth and SDG 9 – Industry, innovation and infrastructure, which can be enabled by eight practices. For example, in the AEC sector, the practice optimise environmental and heritage values of local communities can achieve both SDG 8 and SDG 9. Besides, SDG 17 – Partnership for the Goals, which can be enabled by seven practices. Also, the practice enhance public and stakeholders engagement can achieve SDG 17.

Besides drawing the relationship with the SDGs, this work categorises the 27 practices under the three pillars of sustainability – economy, society and environment (Cato, 2009) as shown in Figure 1. There are 17 practices under the economy pillar. For example, the practice foster circularisation and enable circular economy promotes an economic model of reuse and recycling of existing resources. The practice invest in digital technologies and infrastructure can influence microeconomics within a firm and/ or macroeconomics for a country to invest in scientific institutions. The society pillar comprises eight practices, which include increase the demand for jobs related to automation and enable cloud-based reality environment for training purposesbecause they impact the workforce development in society. There are ten practices under the environment pillar. For example, the practice foster circularisation and enable circular economy not only impact on economybut also on environment by reducing consumption of natural resources. The practice customise design, tools and processes to optimise values can improve, for example, carbon emission, during the digital fabrication process by eliminating non-structural parts on a concrete slab by precise calculation during the early design phase using customised digital tools. Amongst all, the practice of optimise environmental and heritage values of local communities can impact all the three pillars of sustainability.

Furthermore, to investigate further how the practices can be adopted in management in the AEC sector, this work categorises the identified 27 practices under the framework of people, process and technology (Prodan et al. 2015) as shown in Figure 1. The people category comprises eight practices, which include optimise organisational structure and design for human health and social wellbeing. There are 11 practices under the technology. They include optimise resources in consumption through data monitoring and scale creativity and innovation. The process category comprises 12 practices, which include automate decision-making and foster policy development for more efficient actions. Several practices belong to more than one category. For example, thorough waste management and optimise procurement process and supply-chain management are related to both technology and process.

In summary, the 27 practices in the AEC sector can achieve the SDGs in a multi-faceted and integrated away. The following section reviews with examples from the Japanese industry how the AEC adopts the 27 practices under the framework of people, process and technology.

Examples from the Japanese construction industry

Japan was ranked 17th amongst all countries in the overall achievement of SDGs with high ratings in SDG 4 – Quality education, SDG 9 – Industry, innovation and infrastructure and SDG 16 – Peace and justice and strong institutions. The nation is pursuing carbon neutrality and digital transformation to develop a variety of resilient sustainable, and smart cities for promoting human wellbeing. Furthermore, the national vision – Society 5.0 – links science, technology and innovation efforts to SDGs. It aims to provide a sustainable, resilient and secure social environment for all people in accordance with traditional Japanese values that include the “symbiosis with nature” and the “spirit of sharing”. Society 5.0 comprises a “human-centered system that integrates cyberspace and physical spaces”. “It is envisioned as a successor of transformations” (JST, 2021).

Amongst all industries in Japan, the construction industry is one of the industries with high priorities of digital transformation. In the AEC sector, industrialised construction has been highly promoted for decades to adopt modular construction and 3D-printing digital fabrication to different extents. The sector has been promoting digital transformation alongside industrialised construction to boost productivity, efficiency, innovation as well as sustainability through advanced management in the nation. In recent years, the industry and institutions look into design for digital transformation to integrate upstream and downstream people and processes and promote adoption and scaling-up of emerging technologies. The following paragraphs present the examples from Japanese construction firms to explain how they have been adopting the 27 digital transformation practices to different extents in the current practice. These examples were collected through reviews of authority documents JFCC (2022), firms’ documents, presentations and websites, as well as semi-structured interviews with firms’ DX teams. The author of this article conducted cross-referencing, summarised and consolidated the information in this work. The examples demonstrate that the industry adopts the practices to foster inclusiveness, integration and participation. They aim to achieve SDGs through digital transformation (JST, 2021).

People

Japan stipulated the SDGs Implementation Guiding Principles in 2016 to promote collaboration and joint task development amongst a wide range of stakeholders in society, industries and the governments worldwide. The promotion of science, technology and innovation aims to enhance socio-technical advancements through digital transformation (JST, 2021). Many construction firms in Japan have been investing more and more in training and promoting automation-related jobs to cope with increasing demands in operations. Several examples are presented as follows.

• Sekisui House collaborates with domestic and international universities to develop digital fabrication and digital archive centres. This aims to establish an international research and education platform to promote collaboration in computational design, post-digital and architectural history etc., so as to explore directions for the future of housing.
• Sanei Kensetsu increases their demand for jobs related to automation to accommodate their digitised steel life-cycle management system which includes automation in their value chains from design\slash planning to operations.
• Asanuma Corporation has been developing interactive reality environment for training purposes through point-cloud survey technology in combination with detailed 3D models to enhance site safety awareness. Through technological advancement, the workers can imagine the forthcoming situation and the corresponding site safety measures in an immersive and interactive environment.
• Tokyu Construction developed a Virtual Reality (VR) experience-based health and safety educational technology to simulate accidents including major disasters such as falls and collapses of heavy machinery or cranes at construction sites. This enables training for workers to experience accidents in a VR environment and learn to avoid taking careless actions.
• Daiwa House Group optimises organisational structure by launching the D-Succeed successive plan in 2020 to restructure the workforce and advance training to promote co-creation for corporate sustainable development. This also aims to enhance productivity and promote responsible procurement in collaboration with other stakeholders to ensure construction safety and quality through digital transformation.
• Takenaka Corporation uses HoloLens^TM to assist design-to-construction processes for progress inspect off-site in an interactive and immersive reality environment environment through Mixed Reality technology. This helps to enhance engagement within stakeholders, which include clients and multi-disciplinary teams during the early schematic design phase to comprehend and review design, as well as to simulate the construction process in a common virtual environment. Also, Takenaka has been extensively working on cultural heritage retrofit using traditional and advanced methods to optimise environmental and heritage values of local communities. For example, the preserved Chochikukyo in the Kansai region engages the local communities and enhances the regional values that achieve SDG 11 – Sustainable cities and communities in practice.
• Fujita Corporation developed FACEma^TM – an instant face recognition system – together with Kids-way Corporation to detect and record the body temperature of workers with their masks and helmets on to enhance human health and social wellbeing at construction sites during the global pandemic period. The collected data is linked to their internal human resources system to control access for daily entry and workforce health management.

Process

The 12 practices under the process category enable the process of digital transformation in various aspects including management and business models. While the government has been adopting the practice of fostering policy development for more efficient actionsin their recent SDG agenda (JST, 2021), several existing problems such as the short service life of a Japanese house, which is on average 30 years, hinder the achievement of SDGs in particular on some topics such as resource management and circularisation. In the AEC sector in the Japanese industry, many firms adopt these practices to different extents. Several examples are presented as follows.

• Daiwa House Group currently transforms their practices from the “Scrap & Build” approach toward a “Stock-type Society” approach by constructing houses of higher quality and with a longer life span. This can be achieved by optimisation of resources in design and planning using a digital Design for Manufacture and Assembly (DfMA) platform to consider constructability and yet optimise design customisation at the early design phase. Also, the DfMA platform can help to optimise procurement process and supply-chain management. Moreover, Daiwa House adopts thorough waste management by assigning waste management specialists as a new role to conduct evaluations and collect by-products generated at housing construction sites for recycling at the corporate factory. While the material information and building information are stored in the integrated BIM system for planning, design, construction, operations and maintenance, Daiwa House’s resource management approach can foster circularisation and enable circular economy as an innovative business model through digital transformation.
• Tobishima Corporation has developed a construction site co-creation platform “E-Stand” that provides electronic commerce services, with which users can order, receive and make payments by scanning QR codes displayed on a terminal. This platform helps to improve financial transparency and simplify transaction process. Also, the data documented on the platform can provide future services to enforce effective financial risk assessment for procurement.
• Obayashi Corporate uses timber frame structure with Cross Laminated Timber (CLT) load-bearing walls and floors using local Japanese cedar timber (a.k.a. Sugi) on the Port Plus^® Project building located in Tokyo. In this project, most of the timber materials came from Japan to foster responsible sourcing of resources. Besides, most parts of the CLT structures were fabricated by Sunadaya Corporation in Ehime using digital fabrication technology of machine saws and logs to enable mass production with a minimum workforce. The overall design and construction process has been undertaken by integrating data from the BIM design model to the BIM construction model, and then to the BIM manufacturing model.
• Takenaka Corporation has been adopting an integrated project delivery model to foster computational design and digital fabrication with BIM-based platforms. They have been using open BIM platforms including Graphisoft^® ArchiCAD to integrate building information from CAD platforms such as Rhinoceros 3D^® and CAM platforms such as Tekla^® through Solibri^® for coordination to generate open-BIM Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) data that links design and fabrication. This helps to optimise processes and supply-chain management. Besides, Takenaka used visual programming interfaces – Grasshopper^® and Karamba 3D^® – to facilitate data-driven design on their Sanei Headquarter project in the Kansai region. Through extensive simulations, building information analyses and visualisation, digital tools could automate decision-making to optimise the design and the construction process.
• Nohara Holdings is co-developing customised tools and processes to optimise values by using Autodesk^® Revit and AGACAD^® platforms to optimise procurement process and supply-chain management for constructing plasterboards and Light Gauge Steel (LGS) interior partitions. Based on detailed BIM models and schedules, the data feed to CNC fabrication to produce pre-cut components with QR-coded packaging that can assist the logistics and on-site assembly process. Data-rich BIM and the QR-code procedure also help to coordinate between off-site fabrication teams, as well as designers and project managers, and the on-site assembly team. Furthermore, the BIM-based DfMA process significantly reduce wastes thorough waste management at construction sites and provides cost-effective solutions during the early planning phase.
• Sekisui House builds an inter-enterprise information exchange platform using blockchain technology to ensure the security of trusted documentation and information sharing amongst stakeholders including house-makers and end-users. This business model provides an effective end-to-end solution for services ranging from the real estate lease agreement process to establishing insurance contracts. This improve financial transparency and simplify transaction process via blockchain technology. Sekisui House also developed Smart Lock^TM, which enables access to a property for viewing and surveying by pairing with registered digital identities via their smartphones.

Technology

Conclusion

This work reviews recent literature to investigate design for digital transformation to achieve the 17 SDGs by identifying 27 digital practices in the AEC sector based on TWI (2050), Sachs et la. (2019) and Vinuesa et al. (2020). The author of this article categorised the 27 practices under the framework of people, process and technology(Prodan et al. 2015) and the three pillars of sustainability – economy, society and environment (Cato, 2009). The findings are mapped in a tripartite diagram in Figure 1. Moreover, the author selected multiple examples from design-build firms, general contractor firms, manufacturer firms, fabricators firms and house-makers in Japan to present the state-of-the-art digital transformation practices that can achieve SDGs to different extents. The examples are categorised under people, process and technology.

In summary, the key takeaway from this work is that the AEC industry can adopt digital transformation through the identified 27 practices to achieve SDGs to different extents. The practices include increase the demand for jobs related to automation under the people category and the economy and the society pillars, while thorough waste management under the technology and the process categories, as well as the environmental pillar. This work aims to foster digital transformation in the AEC sector and fulfils the global agenda to achieve the 17 SDGs in practice (Figure 2). The presented examples from Japan allow readers to comprehend how the current industry can adopt these practices, so as to achieve SDGs. Nevertheless, digital transformation practices are not limited to the findings in this work.

To further investigate designing for digital transformation for sustainable development in the AEC sector, this work proposes two future research directions as follows.

1. This work provides a holistic overview of digital transformation to achieve SDGs in the AEC sector. More in-depth case studies can be conducted to quantify how the practices achieve sustainability and to measure SDGs achievements in a quantitative way; hence, this can identify the process requirements, bottlenecks and efficiency etc. and draw evaluation to enable continuous improvements.
2. How other countries such as Switzerland adopt the digital transformation practices might be similar or different from the examples from Japan. Future research can conduct a cross-country comparative case study to generalise the findings.

Figure 2_ Digital transformation and sustainable development in architecture, engineering and construction (illustrated by the author, M.S. Ng).

 

Bibliography

 

This work was supported by Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) [fellowship no.: PE21031]

 

Citation (APA style):

Ng, M.S. (2022). Designing for digital transformation to achieve the SDGs with examples from the Japanese construction industry. In B. Wehrli & O. Kassab (Ed.). The Sustainable Development Goals in Context: SDG Blog (3rd edition, p.90). Zurich: ETH Zurich. Retrieved from https://wp-prd.let.ethz.ch/sdgblog2022/chapter/dx-sdg-japan/.