Adam Locke, partnership and innovation leader within the engineering excellence group at contractor Laing O’Rourke, said construction was only beginning to adapt to the possibilities of emerging technology.

He said modular, offsite construction would eventually become a far slicker process, allowing clients to virtually build bridges in the same way customers can currently specify cars.

“We need to industrialise construction to drive productivity and quality,” he told New Civil Engineer. “Cars are coming down in cost while introducing better technology, yet construction isn’t in that zone yet.”

Locke said Laing O’Rourke was about halfway through a 10-year journey to maximise the possibilities of modular construction.

“We have already taken a bridge and built offsite elements that would traditionally have been done insitu, but now we are looking at choosing components in building information models and assembling them virtually rather than guessing what will work,” he said.

“In Formula One, when they need new components for a car, they design and test them virtually before making them physically. This technology is available to us but we have to work out how to use it in our industry.”