投稿日: Dec 17, 2021
Japanese company founded in 1610 powers its construction technology platform with AWS to drive sustainable urban development
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TOKYO—December 17, 2021—Today, Amazon Web Services (AWS), an Amazon.com company, announced that Takenaka Corporation (Takenaka), one of Japan’s leading construction companies, is using AWS as its strategic cloud provider to digitize the construction life cycle and continuously increase productivity using data-driven insights to make projects more efficient. Takenaka built its Building4.0 Digital Platform on AWS to manage data across the entire building project life cycle, including building information modeling (BIM) data, through a single platform. Using the breadth and depth of AWS services, including machine learning, analytics, and robotics, the platform enables suppliers and contractors to securely access, share, and analyze construction data and project costs to manage construction projects more efficiently. Additionally, Takenaka will migrate over 200 mission-critical enterprise applications from its on-premises infrastructure to AWS by the end of 2024 to easily connect the company’s project and enterprise operation data with Building4.0 Digital Platform. Moving these systems to AWS will give the company the scalability, reliability, and agility of the cloud with an expected savings of 25% in infrastructure costs.
To cope with demand for more efficient building processes, Japan’s architecture, engineering, and construction sectors need to raise productivity and make manual work easier on construction sites across the country. To achieve this, Takenaka needed to analyze, forecast, and optimize the construction project life cycle using the cloud. Additionally, with a highly resilient architecture that spans both the AWS Asia Pacific (Tokyo) and Asia Pacific (Osaka) Regions, Takenaka will be able to increase Building4.0 Digital Platform’s fault tolerance, ensuring business continuity of critical construction projects through automatic backups and disaster recovery. The company created a data lake using Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), which centrally stores Takenaka’s structured and unstructured data at scale. This data lake provides the foundation for Building4.0 Digital Platform, enabling Takenaka to uncover trends, leverage insights, and find efficiencies across multiple building projects throughout the entire building process.
To digitize the construction life cycle, Takenaka is building digital twins (virtual representations of construction projects that combine physical construction sites and data from the Building4.0 Digital Platform) using Amazon Kinesis, a service that helps customers easily collect, process, and analyze video and data streams in real time. The digital twins will centralize the remote management of building sites by combining construction progress data; environmental data like carbon dioxide, temperature, and humidity levels; and staffing data in real-time with BIM data. The digital twins can also overlay digital plans on physical construction sites, which makes it easier for building partners to inspect the construction life cycle, both remotely and on-site using mixed-reality headsets, and further adjust staffing or other factors, as needed. With Amazon SageMaker, a fully managed service to build, train, and deploy machine learning models, Takenaka uses personnel forecasting models based on past and ongoing project data, like labor-hour records, to instantly perform staffing simulations and optimize personnel allocation. To make work sites less labor intensive and improve conditions for workers, Takenaka plans to connect Building4.0 Digital Platform with the construction robot platform that the company developed with AWS RoboMaker, which enables developers to quickly and easily build intelligent robotics applications. Using this connection, Takenaka plans to manage and deploy autonomous robots at construction sites.
“With AWS, we’re digitizing the entire construction life cycle, building a platform that makes data central to our business so we can make our construction partner community more productive,” said Keizo Iwashita, General Manager of the Group ICT Promotion Department at Takenaka Corporation. “Machine learning, real-time data analysis, and forecasting have helped us make timely decisions on ongoing and future projects, and using two AWS Regions in Japan gives us the resilience and high availability of our applications to run these critical projects smoothly. With AWS as our strategic cloud provider, we’re becoming an integrated engineering firm that brings suppliers, contractors, and other partners closer together to build more efficiently and sustainably.”
“Takenaka Corporation has been innovating for Japan’s construction industry for more than 400 years, and we are thrilled they chose AWS to build for the future,” said Tadao Nagasaki, President of Amazon Web Services Japan. “AWS’s advanced cloud capabilities, like robotics and machine learning, are helping Takenaka become a pioneer in the digital construction industry, meeting customer demand for efficient and sustainable urban development across Japan.”