One year after the nation’s leading construction and infrastructure companies united to establish the NEXT Coalition to promote and share industry best practices, the Coalition has completed its Construction Safety Challenge and is again calling on innovators to tackle a new competition.

In response to the unprecedented health and safety challenges presented by the COVID-19 pandemic, the Coalition launched its Construction Safety Challenge in July 2020. The challenge pursued safer, healthier, and more sustainable approaches to construction by seeking companies and startups with emerging technology solutions that could be quickly deployed.

After receiving nearly 100 submissions and a refined group of pilot technologies, the Coalition selected Wakecap, Imajion, GoContractor, Remote Optix, Document Crunch and Inspected as featured presenters. The solutions range from wearable technology for contact tracing and social distancing to digital pre-screening of workers and smart video monitoring for health and safety.

The Coalition is now launching its second challenge, the Digital Twin Challenge, which invites companies, startups, and other innovators in the technology community to submit solutions that will enhance the Digital Twin approach. Digital Twin is a virtual representation of a physical facility in the form of a 3D model that contains evolving, dynamically updated data on the state of the facility.

The solution could enhance the Digital Twin approach in any of the following ways:

• Geometry: Reality-capture solutions that allow updating the Digital Twin to reflect the latest look of a facility.
• Data: Physical sensors and other IoT devices that supply a continuous stream of data on objects/environments of a facility.
• Platform: Both the geometry and sensor data combine to offer near-real-time insights on the current state of a facility.

Such applications should apply to the construction phase and carry on for delivery to the owner for use in the operations and maintenance phase.

“The Digital Twin approach is here to stay and will assist the next generation of facility managers as they optimize their operations and enhance the lifecycle of their assets,” said Hamzah Shanbari, Manager of Construction Technology & Innovation at Haskell. “There are many technologies and point solutions that are tackling this approach and we, at Haskell, are excited to work with the Coalition in evaluating these solutions to enhance our overall project delivery for our clients.”

The Coalition also announced that Shawmut Design and Construction and HITT Contracting had joined its growing membership. They join Black & Veatch, DPR Construction, Haskell, McCarthy Building Companies, Swinerton, and Truebeck Construction in leveraging their deep expertise and best practices to identify and advance processes and technologies most likely to advance the industry.

In December 2020, the NEXT Coalition was named “Innovator of the Year” as part of Construction Dive’s “Dive Awards 2020.”