Her career has evolved from focusing on media's societal impacts to influencing prison architecture worldwide.

Bryden Wood’s previous work with the first iterations of platform construction for the Ministry of Justice formed an early step on the P-DfMA path.Trudi Sully was involved with the effort to bring manufacturing into that process as part of her work with the MTC.

She notes that the MOJ programme was a great kickstarter and remains a valuable reference point..When comparing construction’s journey to the evolution of other sectors, such as aerospace and automotive, we find clear examples of the progression that’s possible when shifting from a bespoke and artisan product, to a focus on standardised processes, mass production and mass customisation.Although the construction industry often objects to such comparisons on the basis of being different, the fact is there are tremendous similarities.

In reality, we have much to learn from the other sectors who have progressed successfully down this path ahead of us.. Sully recalls that work on the MOJ project included a certain amount of culture shock, and says there was a chasm that needed bridging in order to bring together the fantastic capabilities of both the manufacturing and construction industries.Now that this new model of working is finally becoming a reality, we need to push forward, focusing our efforts on proving the benefits, propagating the methodology, and enabling it to spread across the sector.

In order to fully drive the change we’re seeking, we need to start delivering real projects.

That’s when we’ll really start getting the level of information we can use and build upon for best effect..Most of this process is to be automated with some manual intervention for transport, quality assurance and painting; processes where automated stations are unnecessary or significantly expensive against provided benefit.. To provide a better understanding of the system, we built a time-based discrete event model to represent the process and provide key outputs for various sets of input parameters.

This allows the designers and stakeholders at an initial planning stage to see, digitally, how their assets could perform during production and provide feedback during the project at the earliest opportunities where large changes can be made to maximise value.. For the purposes of this project, operations upstream of raw material addition, and operations downstream of the final truss painting, were excluded from the simulation.The remaining process steps represented the core fabrication steps to transform raw materials into finished trusses, in addition to some of the largest investments in capital and automation and, therefore, the areas of highest interest.. We built the model itself in AnyLogic, primarily with the process modelling and material handling libraries.

We drew a spatial representation of the factory to define the arrangement, quantity and sizing of process stations and travel routes (including conveyors and forklifts) as well as crane zones to facilitate movement of raw materials and assemblies through parts of the line.We created a logic flow to define how all the raw materials and assembled trusses moved through the system, depending on their types and other parameters..