The 3rd "Co-Creation Cup" National Innovation Competition on Intelligent Construction Technology has just come to an end. In the finals, the BJUT team emerged victorious over all other teams in four rounds of contests and won the grand prize with their steady and outstanding performance.

After several rounds of selection involving preliminary review, preliminaries and defense, 8 university teams were shortlisted out of over 800 entries from universities, construction companies and design firms for the final round of the 3rd "Co-Creation Cup" National Innovation Competition on Intelligent Construction Technology. The 8 finalists were Beijing University of Technology, Harbin Engineering University, Hohai University, Nankai University, Tsinghua University, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Tianjin University and Xi'an University of Architecture and Technology. After an intense competition, the student team from the Faculty of Architecture, Civil and Transportation Engineering of Beijing University of Technology secured the championship at the University Section and won the grand prize with its Research and Innovative Application of a Building Intelligent Operation and Maintenance Platform Based on Digital Twins.

The project team was led by Liu Zhansheng under the guidance of Professor Du XiuLi, Academician of Chinese Academy of Engineering, from the Faculty of Architecture, Civil and Transportation Engineering, and the team consists of 10 doctoral, postgraduate and undergraduate students including Jiao Zedong and Shi Guoliang.

The "Co-Creation Cup" National Innovation Competition on Intelligent Construction Technology is organized by the Technology Innovation Working Committee of China Association of Technology Entrepreneurs. The competition is committed to the integration of research and innovation, technology application, talent training and product promotion in the whole industry chain of the construction sector. The "Co-Creation Cup" national competition has been successfully held for two times and is a highly recognized competition in the industry. The experts who served as judges of the competition made accurate and fair evaluations on the professionalism, research quality, application on construction sites, market value, and spirit of the participating teams.

The competition involved showcase of lots of technologies including CIM, BIM, GIS, IoT, and AI technologies, industrialization of construction, big data in construction, sensor and intelligent sensing technologies, intelligent construction equipment and robotics, digital twin technology, 5G technology, virtual reality technologies (AR, VR, and MR), information management platforms, green construction technologies, construction of smart sites, smart operations and maintenance, and carbon neutral and green energy technologies. It also encouraged technology integration, cross-innovation, and engineering practice.

A new online and offline competition model, which turned out to be very successful, was developed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The competition consisted of several parts involving project presentation, project understanding, competition among teams, and knowledge assessment. The final weighted score of each team was calculated based on their scores of each part. The participating teams were then ranked by their final scores,with the top three teams being awarded the first, second and third prize. Meanwhile, the Spirit Award and the Most Valuable Team Award were presented to winning teams based on special scoring.

Profile of the winning project

BJUT's candidate project was highly recognized by the panel judges. Research and Innovative Application of a Building Intelligent Operation and Maintenance Platform Based on Digital Twins pioneers the application of digital twin technology in construction by building a visualized intelligent operations and maintenance platform based on digital twin technology to address the needs of building operations and maintenance, intelligent enhancement of the construction industry, and safety risk monitoring and prediction. With continuous iteration, the system gets more intuitive and interactive.

The system and related technologies have been applied in projects such as venues of the Beijing Winter Olympics, Beijing Public Housing Center, Suqian Green Building Materials Center, and metro construction.

The system, supported by digital twin technology, enables real-time dynamic visualization, early warning and emergency decisions, energy consumption reduction with automatic strategies, etc. It focuses on enhancing the application of intelligent security systems, building an information-based, three-dimensional, full-coverage intelligent operations and maintenance system, and making operations and maintenance smarter.

Application in the Winter Olympics bobsleigh track project

Competition-based learning boosts talent training

Since 2020, relying on its first-level discipline of civil engineering, BJUT has added a new major of intelligent construction to respond to national strategic needs and the upgrading and transformation of the construction industry. The program offers professional knowledge of mechanical design manufacturing and automation, electronic information and automation, computer science and engineering, engineering management, among others. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach, the program aims to equip engineering students with extensive and profound knowledge, good science and humanistic literacy, outstanding engineering practice ability, and strong innovation skills. In addition to lectures and research, students are encouraged to actively participate in various innovation competitions to turn their knowledge into action and improve their comprehensive capabilities to transfer their knowledge into practice.

Screenshot of the finalists' online defense (left: Li Jingfan; middle: Jiao Zedong; right: Shi Guoliang)

The "Co-Creation Cup" competition is an important annual event for intelligent construction students. At the end of the final, Jiao Zedong from BJUT gave a speech on behalf of the winning teams. He highlighted the importance of the "Co-Creation Cup" as a good opportunity for students to engage in competition-based learning, get advice from experts, and see many outstanding projects. He hoped to have more interactions with the participants after the competition, and work with them to make contributions to the development of the intelligent construction industry.

In recent years, FACTE has attached great importance to equipping students with innovation skills and the ability to apply knowledge into practice. It has closely followed the positioning of talent training and the characteristics of disciplines and specialties. Focusing on the competition system, it has improved the training models of competition-based learning, competition-based teaching, and competition-based innovation, becoming the cradle of students' extracurricular academic achievements and technology innovation. Moving forward, FACTE will keep learning from experiences on intelligent construction to further motivate students to engage in research and competitions, create a stronger atmosphere of intelligent construction discipline, take technology innovation efforts for students to the next level, and train highly qualified talents for the intelligent transformation of the construction industry.