Digital Engineering, Technologies, Projects and Initiatives

The need to reduce the cost of delivering, managing and maintaining built assets, as well as the need to deliver better services, is driving a period of evolution in the architectural, construction, engineering and facilities/asset management industries. In future, digital built assets and environments will need to deliver more demanding fiscal, functional, sustainability and growth objectives, which in turn will promote changes in procurement, delivery and operational processes.

These will involve:

• more transparent, open ways of working;
• cross-sector and cross-organisation collaborative working;
• the sharing of both detailed models and large amounts of digital data and inforamtion; and
• better asset lifecycle management by capture of data and information about real-time use, performance and condition.

Built Assets

In addition to the changes described above, off-site, factory-based fabrication and on-site automation will increasingly be utilised in the creation of new built assets. In both new and existing assets, the use of sophisticated cyber-physical systems combining sensors and actuators to achieve benefits such as increases in energy efficiency and better asset lifecycle management will become commonplace.

With this growing use of, and dependence on, information and communications technologies, asset owners will have to identify and implement appropriate and proportionate measures to reduce the risk of loss or disclosure of information which could impact on the safety and security of:

• personnel and other occupants or users of their built assets;
• the built asset itself;
• asset data and information; and/or
• the benefits the built asset exists to deliver, whether social, environmental and/or commercial.

Measures such as these can also help protect against the loss, theft or disclosure of valuable commercial information and intellectual property.

Within this context, NPSA sponsored PAS 1192-5, Specification for security-minded building information modelling, digital built environments and smart asset management which was published in 2015. The PAS, which applies to both building and infrastructure assets, provides a framework to assist asset owners and stakeholders in understanding the key vulnerability issues and the nature of the controls required to deliver the trustworthiness and security of digital built assets.

The development of PAS 1192-5 was facilitated by BSI Standards Limited and it was published under licence from The British Standards Institution. Copies of PAS1192-5 are available for download. It is a companion document to PAS 1192-2, PAS 1192-3 and BS 1192-4. You will find it useful to obtain copies of these as well (summarised on the BSI website and available as downloads).

NPSA are publishing a range of advisory materials to help with understanding PAS 1192-5, its context and implementation. These are available in the resources section below.

We will continue to add to this page with further sector specific advice and news.

Smart Cities

While a service may be delivered by a single organisation, many public services are provided by numerous organisations, potentially from more than one sector. Further, it is likely that these organisations will comprise a mixture of public bodies, private companies, and third sector organisations and will need to share data and information between them.

More information on the security-minded approach to be adopted under these circumstances is available.