However, local industry discussion of DfMA remains dominated by the idea of standardised PPVC modules being stacked up to form finished buildings..

There are also operational and contractual issues to be overcome.. Clients of DCs want efficiency and reliability and are usually uninterested in wider operational considerations.Equally, any local heating project where homes rely on a DC for their domestic heating would be compromised if the DC is shut down for weeks in winter.. Making use of this valuable waste energy requires these conundrums to be resolved.

This may become critical as the sustainability spotlight increasingly shines on these energy consumers..Some companies are exploring an industrial synergy with food production using low grade heat and heat pumps, but this is in early development..The feeling in the room was that, due to the regulations, Europe is pricing itself out of the general market – although due to data sovereignty a market will be retained.. Generally, green energy is more expensive, which also distorts the market.

But programmes like the Bernwick bank 4-GigaWatt wind farm may ease the UK situation in the longer term..Although self-generated power looks like a silver bullet, bought utilities are significantly cheaper than those self-generated.

These pressing needs are making self-generation and nuclear a more likely option.. Fusion as well as fission is being discussed, but what is a realistic timescale?.

The group felt that DCs need to be part of regional, city, utility, industrial and energy strategies.However, one does not need to rigidly prescribe any of these aspects in detail, or hard-code them, to derive the results, but rather use the simulation engine to logically sequence operations and how resources are used.. A simple example of this could be a set of assembly operations occurring simultaneously, which use both shared components – bolts, for example – and resources, such as an operator or a wrench.

Creating this model in a simulation tool would require defining individual assembly sequences and required resources at each step, the resources available and, depending on the requirements of the project, component stock, transport, and necessary aspects of the supply chain.When the model is run, the simulation engine dynamically uses resources and components to complete the tasks and the model statistics derived could indicate how both individual processes, and the system, would perform..

Ultimately this also allows for modelling flexibility as operations sequences, rules and resource information can be loaded from external files and changed dynamically during model runtime.Similarly, the highly visual nature of these tools can provide direct feedback to users while the simulation is running, or export data which can then be visualised in another tool (such as Tableau or Power BI).