Working out the basics of new sustainability in workshops

As one of many impact paths of digital transformation, "digitalisation" affects the laboratory world in many ways. Digitalisation will, therefore, decisively influence and shape developments in the planning, construction, operation and use of laboratory buildings and laboratories soon.

• As a powerful support tool, digitalisation will directly intervene in previous cooperation processes known up to now and demand a new type of cooperation and other or new functions and roles for the cooperation partners.
• This already starts with the increasing automation of routine tasks or the collaboration between human laboratory workers and robots in the laboratory, where the control over the speed and proportion of work seems to be transferred from the people involved to robots that work quickly and more precisely.
• In the laboratory, experimental processes primarily generate a wealth of data, the streaming and management of which is usually carried out with the help of LIMS. Monitoring the equipment, its consumption data, maintenance requirements and, in other words, ensuring that it is ready for operation is also part of the digitisation process.    
• The digitalised planning method BIM is changing the cooperation between clients, planners, manufacturers and contractors in the planning and construction of laboratory buildings and other complex construction projects.
• The flow of digital data concerning building technology, occupancy and use enables pervasive management of the buildings. Therefore, the corresponding building administrations (facility management), established in the analogue, must develop their working methods further.

EGNATON and HIS-HE, Hannover, are coordinating a corresponding workshop to be held in spring 2023. Three working groups are preparing the topics in a series of working sessions.

Status of the workshop: active     

The question of a standardised and transparent sustainability assessment of a laboratory ventilation system only seems easy to answer at first glance.

• In the first approximation, blanket key figures are sought that can be formed from data and information that are as quickly accessible as possible.
• The key figures should categorise meaningful sustainability criteria and be represented both by nominal values in planning and by measured values in operation.

A group of architects, laboratory and technical planners, fume cupboard specialists, operators and safety engineers set out to discuss and jointly develop an evaluation system for laboratory ventilation linkable to the German DGNB evaluation system.

Status of the workshop: active

Due to the problematic definition of structural parameters and the relatively large amount of time and effort required for data collection, lifecycle costing is mainly carried out only once after completing a building design.

We want to know whether and, if so, in what form we can also develop LCC as a planning tool to support sustainable planning and improve the planning result.

• To what extent can the "grain" of the LCC process be changed and the different variants be used in the planning, construction and operation of laboratory buildings?
• What needs to be done to obtain a simple LCC form for the reliable sustainability assessment of specific planning variants?
• What is the effect of widening / narrowing the edges of the scenario funnel on the reliability of a sustainability assessment?

Status of the workshop:  planned