Gulf Construction Online - Software to keep Masdar goals on track

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Software to keep Masdar goals on track

01 March 2012

MASDAR City has selected PE International’s SoFi software, a high-performance tool to monitor carbon embodied in buildings for its ambitious project to construct one of the world’s most sustainable cities.

The software provides a central platform for benchmarking and forecasting performance and developing strategies for sustainability. The system is currently playing a key role in helping Masdar’s supply chain team and contractors track and monitor the carbon embodiment of building materials, thereby enabling them to calculate the amount of carbon associated with construction activities.

Masdar City, one of the integrated units of Abu Dhabi’s multi-faceted renewable energy company Masdar, has captured enormous worldwide interest by demonstrating how sustainable cities can be developed.

Commenting on the use of SoFi, Alan Frost, director of Masdar City, said: “Through SoFi we can monitor carbon performance during construction and quantify how well we are meeting our goals. This is vital for Masdar and our stakeholders in terms of validating our ambition of building one of the most sustainable cities in the world.”

“It is an honour to be supporting Masdar in this illustrious project,” said Neil D’Souza, SoFi product manager at PE International. “We believe SoFi can play a major role in helping city construction projects around the world to construct sustainable buildings.”

Having integrated SoFi into its project, Masdar now is capable of target setting and monitoring the evolving project. It can also use SoFi for benchmarking against targets and comparing how much CO2 (carbon dioxide) would be involved in producing a building in the city compared to a standard building in, for example, London, Paris or New York.

A key ability of SoFi is its distributed data acquisition, which gives Masdar City great flexibility in how it collects information from different sources, while the system’s analytics will support decision-making. For example, being able to see that a building is 50 per cent complete, yet already 70 per cent on the way to meeting its emission target, will help affect decision making on possible corrective measures.

Meanwhile, the new Siemens headquarters for the Middle East region currently being built in Masdar City has been named winner of the coveted MIPIM Architectural Review Future Projects Awards 2012 in the Offices category.

The new building, designed by Sheppard Robson, is part of a long-term strategic partnership between Masdar and Siemens to develop and utilise key energy-efficient technologies. The building, commissioned by Masdar and designed with strong oversight by Siemens Real Estate, will meet the highest requirements in terms of architecture, energy efficiency and equipment – potentially resulting in a 45 per cent reduction in energy consumption and a 50 per cent reduction in water consumption (compared with the international acknowledged Ashrae standard).