A new international research centre aimed at improving the productivity of energy, minerals, infrastructure and construction projects was recently launched at Curtin University.
The Australasian Joint Research Centre for Building Information Modelling is a collaboration between Curtin University and Huazhong University of Science and Technology (HUST) in Wuhan, China. It will focus on developing the capability of Building Information Modelling (BIM), an advanced approach that enables the physical and functional characteristics of a building to be digitally generated and assessed.
President of China’s Northeastern University Professor Lieyun Ding visited Curtin last month with a five-person senior delegation to open the Joint Research Centre for BIM, which will enable the latest BIM knowledge to be shared among researchers, engineers and innovators in the energy, mineral, infrastructure and construction industries across Australia and China.
Woodside Energy Ltd. supported Curtin in hosting the delegation by organising a field trip to the remote Pluto LNG plant 1,800 km north of Perth for the visiting delegation, Curtin representatives, and the general consul of China in Perth. The official announcement was also made of the recent appointment of Mr Martijn Truijens, Lean Construction Technology Advisor at Woodside, as Adjunct Professor at Curtin in recognition of his leadership of the successful Project ‘ECHO’ and as external advisor to the joint BIM Centre.
Curtin’s Professor Xiangyu Wang, Co-Director of the centre, said the work done there will develop pioneering research to assist critical decision-making at every stage of the construction project life cycle.
“The Centre was established to help increase Australia’s competitiveness, creating new critical knowledge and developing approaches and solutions through research to reduce cost schedule overruns, especially for mega-projects, and to help minimise risk and safety issues,” Professor Wang said.
“BIM has been previously recognised and adopted as a tool in building construction industries, but our new Centre will advance BIM much further.”
“The Centre will conduct high-end research and integrate it with advanced technologies such as Virtual Reality, wearable computing, mobile and ubiquitous computing, tracking and sensing, social networking tools, user interaction, cloud computing, Augmented Reality, semantics and more.”
The Centre’s research will also see improvements across the life cycle of smaller-scale construction projects, such as hospitals and commercial projects.
As one of the achievements from this visit made by the Northeastern University delegation team, both universities voiced their interest to collaborate in multi-disciplinary deep mining research by forming a team of experts working in rock mechanics, petroleum engineering, automation and BIM.
Contact:
Professor Xiangyu Wang, Curtin University
Tel: 08 9266 9059, Email: xiangyu.wang@curtin.edu.au
Megan Meates, Public Relations, Curtin University
Tel: 08 9266 4241, Mob: 0401 103 755, Email: megan.meates@curtin.edu.au
