ECCOlab – a new solution at www.eccolab.co
Currently most design teams focus only on operational energy and cost of a building, and often only the operational utility costs at that. In financial analysis no one would approach a business decision this way; the cost of the loan and the revenue must be considered together. Our tool brings this approach to the construction sector addressing embodied as well as operation carbon and cost.
In addition, interrelated issue such as waste, responsible sourcing and health and wellbeing of materials are not addressed in a unified manner. They are usually carried out in a range of independent analysis’ and are often too time consuming to have any impact on any direct design decision. They are often more of a rubber-stamping exercise, seeing if BREEAM points can be achieved after the materials have already been specified.
The Solution is ECCOlab
It allows rapid analysis of the building for the life of the project by rapidly simulating lifecycle cost and carbon as well last the life cycle waste, responsible sourcing and health and wellbeing impacts. It achieves this by bringing the model into a single web environment where cloud simulations of the project take place. The model is attributed with materials from the vast material database (all of which can be extend / manipulated) allowing detailed information / data to be rapidly added to the BIM model even at concept stage. This allows intelligent decisions to be made at the most beneficial point, at the concept design stage of the project.
The tool is also a collaboration tool and operates like Google Docs in that all members of the team can work live on the same model. This eliminates the current silo analysis approach where consultants go off for two weeks at a time and carry out often divergent analysis, often on an out of date model.
Being cloud based the simulation process is vastly quicker than the previous generation of simulation software (minutes for a simulation instead of hours). As such, the tool allows multiple iterations of a project to simulate different strategies and allow rapid project optimisation to take place.