MOE

MOE is one of Denmark’s largest multidisciplinary consulting engineering companies, with offices throughout Denmark and subsidiaries in Norway and the Philippines. The firm is part of Artelia Group, an international multidisciplinary consultancy, engineering, and project management group that specializes in the building construction, infrastructure, water, and energy industries. Artelia Group is owned in its entirety by its managers and employees, and has offices in more than 30 countries throughout Europe, Africa, the Middle East, Asia, and the Americas. 

MOE is dedicated to playing an active part in shaping a new world based on sustainability and mutual respect. Supporting the principles of the United Nations’ Global Compact and working to protect human rights, MOE is committed to contributing to the advancement of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals.

Challenge

The climate crisis is the world’s greatest priority, and with the population growth rate showing no signs of slowing—and construction, infrastructure, and transportation needs having to match that growth—materials used in construction increasingly play an essential role in humankind’s interaction with and effect on the environment.

Construction materials have varying sizes of carbon footprints. In order to achieve deep cuts in carbon emissions—per the Paris Agreement on climate change and the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals—AEC stakeholders need to shift to utilizing more-sustainable building materials. But it has proved challenging to gain an overview of how building parts in a construction project contribute to overall CO2 emissions. 

In response, MOE decided to develop a tool to help customers choose building materials based on the levels of CO2 emissions involved in their use. The MOE development team knew that with enough information presented in a structurally accessible way, customers could get involved at an early stage of the design process and choose to reduce CO2 emissions of their buildings—playing their parts in environmentally responsible, sustainable development.

How MOE solved it with Forge

The Forge platform is the primary tool empowering the MOE solution, which organizes and renders complex project data into simple visual representations that provide decision-makers with key environmental information about project materials. 

The team’s overriding aim, when designing the new tool, was to find a way to extract project metadata and aggregate it with different types of data and formulas regarding the carbon emissions of various materials. Then, the team wanted to represent that data in charts and graphs that stakeholders could easily access and understand. 

The Forge Viewer API enables MOE developers to view and validate Revit models previously built and stored in BIM 360 construction management software. The team uses the Model Derivative API to retrieve the properties of the project elements and ensure the number of the parameters correspond with Revit schedules. The Data Management API helps users navigate to and translate the project items. When the data has been structurally stored in connected databases, the team can combine it with outsourced databases that provide information on materials’ carbon emissions. The Viewer API renders the resulting information into graphs and charts viewable with any device on any web browser, with no need for extra software installations. 

Now MOE customers can use this visualization tool to, for example, isolate all building facades and see their total carbon emissions right away—all from the rough sketch of a building. Stakeholders can access information from any location, improving collaboration. Changes can be made early on to better adapt the project to improve sustainability and cost. With the capacity of this Forge-powered tool, MOE won The Climate Challenge project—collaborating on the design and build of the new Climate Challenge Laboratory at The Technical University of Denmark (DTU). 

Forge highlights include the following: 

• Renders complex metadata into easily understandable, browser-accessible graphs and charts.
• Enables environmentally responsible decision-making early in a project’s life, saving cost and improving building sustainability. 
• Automates project data extraction, saving time.

To learn more about MOE and Artelia Group, please visit them on the web:

• MOE website
• MOE LinkedIn
• MOE Instagram
• MOE Facebook
• Artelia Group website
• Artelia Group LinkedIn

APIs and Services

BIM 360 API

Data Management API

Model Derivative API

Viewer