TimberX - Leveraging Digital Innovation to Expand Knowledge of Mass Timber

The client's (FII) mission is to help create, maintain and diversify markets for BC’s world-class, environmentally friendly forest products. In doing so FII requisitions various studies into the feasibility of mass timber construction to forward the industry in this direction. One of the concerns is that timber is often "off-ramped" at very early project stages due to apparent misconceptions about the structural ramifications of its use (too costly, takes up too much structural depth, etc.). In the scope of this work, WSP was retained with the goal to perform thousands of conceptual-level structural design optimizations to build out a database of acceptable single floor bay structural solutions for 4 sectors (residential, long term care, office/school and flexible loading condition), 9 structural system types, and a range of bay sizes (ranging from 3 x 3 to 10 x 10). The resulting 8,100 solutions in the database were also to be ranked based on bay weight, structural depth, cost per square metre and embodied carbon per square metre and displayed in an easy-to-use, graphically appealing and transparent interface. TimberX makes this structural engineering knowledge readily available for architects, developers and building owner's to leverage in early-stage decision making. 

With the primary goal being educating Owners, Architects and Developers, and providing a tool for informed decision making at their fingertips, TimberX achieves this through how results are presented to the end user. A simple web-based interface was created to be able to digest and compare the options on the aforementioned 4 key metrics relevant to building Owners (cost per square metre, embodied carbon per square metre, structural depth, and bay weight), all with equal weighting. This allows the Owner, Architect, Developer to get a good sense of what they might expect the structural system to look like even when just conceptualizing a building prior to involving a structural engineer. The final tool presents the data in a fashion that could be likened to websites for comparing cars for purchase, providing insights on what to expect if the building project the user is conceptualizing while using the tool were to advance. Results are not biased and instead present the findings contained in the optimized database of structural solutions. To create transparency a detailed user guide is also provided including the unit cost rates included in the calculations (provided by BTY group) as well as the embodied carbon unit rates, allowing any user of the tool to truly interrogate the results shown and try to find ways to improve while not making the data too difficult to digest.