Each year the Constructing Excellence Awards are a celebration of everything the UK’s Built Environment has to be proud of. The awards are designed to showcase how the Constructing Excellence principles are delivered in practice and crucially inspire others to embrace these principles.

Winners are selected through their Regional Awards programme to go forward to the National Finals.

These prestigious Awards provide a very special showcase of excellence in the Built Environment across England and Wales, bringing together the regional winners in each of the 13 categories to celebrate the very best of the best.

Innovation Award: Regional Winner

Project: Panoptic Bridge Management
Organisations: Waldeck, Network Rail, Nottingham Trent University, Birmingham City University

The asset viewing solution developed by Waldeck in collaboration with Nottingham Trent University (NTU) and Birmingham City University (BCU) through the Panoptic Bridge Management project commissioned by Network Rail is a bridge digital examination solution which brings about a change in the undertaking of on the ground inspections, these being reduced or simplified, limiting the number of person hours on site and optimises bridge maintenance activities.

The system features a web-based Point Cloud viewer and a virtual tour environment (360-degree images and flat images) to enable an engineer to perform virtual examination and record comments on the condition of the asset. The virtual tour environment is supported by a proof-of-concept machine learning tool for masonry defect recognition / categorisation, and incorporating and tracking of previously recorded defects against the asset within the system improves the digital record and inspection of Network Rail’s bridge assets.

The system has been developed to automatically generate Network Rail’s Bridge Condition Marking Index (BCMI) score based upon the calculation developed by Network Rail as a high-level asset management tool to track a bridge asset condition over time.

Three winning key facts:

  • Reduces the occurrence of ‘boots on ballast’, improving worker safety
  • Reduces delay to passenger services during planned inspections
  • Network Rail estimates that use of the system will deliver benefits worth more than ten times the investment

You can view the project on the Constructing Excellence website here: Panoptic Bridge Management – Constructing Excellence

More from Constructing Excellence

Innovation more than invention is critical to every sector to deliver outstanding results, break through productivity barriers and address our customers, communities and global needs. Our sector solves problems every day, yet rarely are we systemic in our organisations and projects to drive and embed a culture for innovation in our teams or our supply chain partners.

In this category, the judges were looking for organisations to demonstrate how they foster a culture for innovation and systematically solve quantified problems with new or repurposed tools and techniques used by other sectors or organisations – to deliver quantified better productivity, profitability, sustainability or any other critical element with the use of an innovative product or approach that can/will be repeatedly used within the organisation or wider sector.

The 2024 Awards will take place at the Marriott Grosvenor Square on 15th November. Good luck to all of this year’s National Finalists!