BE Conference 2008 Report – Sustaining Infrastructure

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Industry News
BE Conference 2008 Report – Sustaining Infrastructure
By Susan Smith

BE Conference 2008, held this year in Baltimore, Md., attracted over 2,000 attendees from 50 countries.

A new website at Bentley.com; the new BE Communities, where members can connect with similar minded members, and create a profile much like you do on LinkedIn; and new green and white business cards for Bentley employees were some changes to take note of. Green was a theme of the conference: Bentley is going green, pointing out that Bentley technologies were used in Baltimore’s Clearwater Mills’ design of the first waterwheel powered trash collector which collects trash that gathers in Baltimore’s Inner Harbor.

Greg Bentley, CEO Bentley Systems

Greg Bentley, CEO, Bentley Systems

The theme of this year’s conference, “Best Practices for Sustaining Infrastructure,” extended far beyond a basic theme to shape the conference in a cohesive way. “The quality of life depends on the quality of our infrastructure,” Bentley noted. “Sustaining our environment is not incompatible with sustaining our markets.”

The financial returns on the environmental effort will be forthcoming, said Bentley, suggesting that they encouraged public private partnerships in those areas that have been traditionally funded by taxation.

Bentley Systems generated continuous revenue growth of 16% to reach nearly $450 million in 2007, according to a Daratech report. Over $200 million of that revenue was attributable to geospatial. “Autodesk no longer leads us by half,” said Greg Bentley.

In its green effort, Bentley has engaged the help of leading environmental consultants to reduce the company’s carbon footprint and seeks to reduce that footprint 15% per colleague by the end of 2009, by reducing business travel, and growing their virtual online learning with Bentley LEARN and LEARN Server, among other efforts.

Greg Bentley told the audience that “almost every one of your organizations will be involved with integrated project delivery in the future.”

Collaboration is where the greatest gains are expected from IT, Bentley explained, segueing the talk to Bentley ProjectWise, which he described as a “cost performing asset.”

To Bentley’s credit, 80% of ENR top 50 design firms rely on ProjectWise to collaborate globally. For example, the NYSDOT ProjectWise usage connects their ProjectWise real time configuration to show all their 3,400 users across the state – who have access to more than a million DGN files, with functions that span the lifecycle of transportation.

ProjectWise can be used online for public private partnerships, and with the ProjectWise WebView Server which requires no licenses, more people beyond CAD professionals can use it.

The various educational offerings from Bentley include classroom learning closer to your workplace, regional training events, some of which can be co-located with BE user group meetings. Live distance learning via the Internet which offers live collaboration with an instructor, eliminates travel time, cost and waste.

Acquisitions for 2007 included:

• ECT promis*e, offering productive and accurate electrical design that takes advantage of repository of over 2,000 parts
• Hevacomp from the UK. Tony Baxter, formerly of Hevacomp and now director Bentley Building, said that in the UK, you must submit an energy model accounting for all energy consumption. A 30-year old company, Hevacomp provides tools for electrical and mechanical building design, including heating, cooling, pipe and duct sizing and energy analysis software.
• EDSL (Energy Design Solutions Limited) provides energy analysis modeling, and offers worldwide distribution to Bentley of TAS software for dynamic simulation of forced air flow.
• LEAP Software provides analysis and design products for concrete bridges, and is an industry standard across North America. With the trend toward concrete construction over steel, the new Bentley product will combine ProConcrete 3D, companion to ProSteel 3D, into ProStructures.

Bridge design and construction is a foremost offering in Bentley’s Civil division. According to Lee Tanase, VP Bentley BriM, the goal is to integrate Bentley applications and provide data downstream beyond the bridge analysis to other phases like construction fabrication, and maintenance.

Exciting developments abound in Bentley’s new Applied Research division which attendees could view on the exhibit floor. The new research division goes where no ordinary R&D or product development team can go. As research director for computational design, Volker Mueller said, “In Applied Research, you are free to fail.”

That dynamic allows pure freedom of exploration into product or non-product areas, exploring the ‘what-ifs.’ Some recent innovations include:

1) Dynamic plots with special redlining pens that record your conversation and notations while drawing which can be imported back to your designs.

2) Augmented reality technology that allows you to display a 3D model on top of a drawing. Using a portable device equipped with a camera, a MicroStation user can view the 3D model that corresponds to a drawing from different points of view, the model being superimposed on top of the image of the drawing as if it was extruded from it, simply by moving around the drawing and pointing at it with the camera.

3) A Z Corp 3D printer (Z Corp was an exhibitor at the show) can print labels, logos and text around and on top of a physical 3D model. You can create an “interactive” 2D barcode and with software added to a camera phone, it can read the barcode code.

4) Another demonstration showed models being viewed on portable devices based on the user’s orientation. An ultra mobile PC was equipped with an orientation sensor, that was used to calculate the user’s orientation. The model was rendered in MicroStation from the same orientation, in real time, as if the model was virtually located “around the user”. The user could then view the model simply by moving the ultra mobile PC around, without using a mouse or keyboard.

5) The construction monitoring pod showed a tablet PC equipped with a webcam and a GPS, enabling a user visiting a construction site to monitor the progress of the work by viewing the model of the building from his current geographic position. He or she can take pictures of the site and store them with geolocalization information in the DGN, for review back at the office.

6) The collaborative review pod showed a networking technology that lets two or more users of MicroStation connected to the Internet to view and markup a model simultaneously with high efficiency, regardless of model size or network speed.

7) An integrated optimization modeling approach has been developed for predicting whereabouts and size of water leakage hotspots in water distribution systems. It leverages the usage of well-established hydraulic model and enables site engineers to focus on the most likely leakage areas to exactly locate leakage pipelines, thus to achieve cost-effective water loss reduction.

GenerativeComponents (GC) derived from the first Applied Research Group and is now a commercial product offered with the purchase of MicroStation or individually. Fostered by community based development, the product was quickly embraced by architects who wanted to explore a range of alternatives cost effectively. Those enthusiastic users have gone on to become the SmartGeometry Group.

Mentioned was Bentley’s reliance on ISO 15926 for interoperability, intraoperations and persistence in process and plant information. The product OpenPlant PID was introduced early this year, and newly announced is the OpenPlant PDx Manager which makes it possible for users of both MicroStation and PDS to access data in ISO 15926.

Bentley also acquired Common Point Inc. whose product, ConstructSim, includes construction simulation and actuals during construction, a completely virtual and visual model further powered by ProjectWise.

Andrew Winston, founder of Winston Eco Strategies, author of Green to Gold

Andrew Winston, founder of Winston Eco-Strategies

Andrew Winston’s mantra is about how smart companies use environmental strategies to innovate, create value, and build competitive advantage. He said that change is a big theme in his work, quoting Charles Darwin: “It’s not the strongest of species that survives nor most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.”

Winston spent two years on the road talking with big companies who were going green, to understand why they were doing it and what was working and not working. The business community has to have a profit motive for going green, he said.

The Green wave is two-pronged: 1) the natural world, with its constraints that we’re all starting to feel – water, climate, deforestation, waste, ozone, air pollution, biodiversity (web of life). 2) climate change (there is no debate about this in the scientific community).

Infrastructure is a solution to a lot of these problems, said Winston, in the shape of water reclamation, high speed rail, and communication networks.

Rulemakers such as watchdogs, government regulators and NGOs have issued directives about how we deal with waste. On the federal level, Winston pointed out that no activity has taken place regarding the environment for seven years. On the other hand, local and state governments have taken action, even incorporating LEED municipal building codes into their plans for new municipal buildings.

General Motors, Ford and Xerox asked Congress for a cap on carbons as that will raise the cost of emissions. They figure they will get more customers from going green.

Media coverage on green has escalated in the past year and consumers are seeing it in all aspects of their lives.

Business to Business we are seeing the effect: a case in point is Wal-Mart, who asked suppliers to reduce packaging. Wal-Mart wants to know how much energy it took to make a product. The companies that can put together the best data will get the best shelf space. (Winston did note that they would need software to put together this data).

Consumers want to work for green companies. Banks and shareholders are now agreeing not to fund traditional coal plants anymore.

The effect of gas prices has really driven people to buy the Prius and American auto companies not offering a fuel efficient equivalent are not doing so well.

Winston ended by citing a phrase uttered by Gene Kranz, Mission Control for Apollo 13 to describe going green – “failure is not an option.”

Keith Bentley, CTO, Bentley Systems

In his talk, Keith Bentley outlined unique software requirements in the infrastructure industry–

• Long horizons, large investments
• large datasets
• distributed data model
• heterogeneous data types
• complex workflows, IP , liabilities, handovers
• innovation vs. certainty

In evaluating software for sustainability there is similar criteria as for physical infrastructure:

• Correct design/architecture
• comprehensive
• extensible
• scalable
• support/operations

“Absent a good design, nothing else matters,” said Bentley. The model for sustainable software is as follows:

Keith Bentley, CTO, Bentley Systems

1. Sustainable software: architecture

• designed in layers (platform)
• consistency of implementation
• consistent user experience
• breadth of services
• depth of functionality

Data management

• distributed/federated data model
• managed change control, consistency
• digital rights, digital signatures

2. Sustainable Software – comprehensive

Avoid dead ends and roadblocks

• Integrated
• solutions leveraged through platform
• robust data format (DGN)
• real world testing
• Interoperable
• support relevant standards (ISO 15926, IFC, WMS, etc.)
• publish to standard formats (e.g. PDF)
• Published APIs
• Direct read/write important formats.

3. Sustainable software: extensible

• Planning for issues you don’t have.
• Continuous incremental improvement (more work on backwards and forwards compatibility than other vendors)
• Innovation, redesign
• Third party solutions (is a priority now, hasn’t been for 6-7 years)
• Acquisitions (Bentley has done over 40 over the last 5 years)

4. Sustainable software: scalable

A. Scope
- Distributed federated data model
- parallel workflows
- interoperability platform
B. Magnitude
- definition of big increases every year
- avoid hard limits/bounds
- avoid N2 algorithms, memory abuses
- real world testing

2008 Desktop recommendations:
- 64 bit computer
- Windows 64 editions (Vista)
- 4 G memory
- 2 plus cores

Graphic card
• DX9 Shader Model 3
• 256 plus MB
• Latest graphics driver
• See MicroStation V8XM graphics benchmark

Bentley’s advice to users is to buy as much memory as you can. Lots of new features are being designed to work with two cores. The company is employing some of the techniques the gaming market uses, and suggests buying a gaming card.

5) Sustainable software: O&S

User and vendor interests aligned:
• Bentley SELECT
• ELS (Enterprise License Subscription)
• ETS (Enterprise Training Subscription)
• Leverage your “IS” standards – Oracle, SAP, PDF, Microsoft

“Athens”

Athens, the upcoming Bentley software release, enables integrated conceptual design, geocoordination, modeling analysis, design; project delivery, and operations. With it, you can derive analysis models from physical models. Every Bentley product will be part of the Athens release.

Because products from different disciplines and vendors are used on almost all design projects, users need to deliver projects without problems of importation or translation. There is the need to synthesize legacy and design data, and visualize designs, and connect the design to work processes, enterprise integration and support essential standards. With Athens you will be able to import Revit models into MicroStation and extract and post ESRI ArcSDE data to MicroStation.

In Athens, models are drawings and drawings are models, in other words, changes to your 3D models automatically show up on your 2D sheet. Users can do a visual inspection between electrical and mechanical. There are also Dynamic views, various illustration, surface, color and monochrome and lighting features included.

Athens is said by Bentley to be “the most significant release of MicroStation yet,” and is scheduled to be released in Q4 2008.

Beyond Green Buildings

Rebecca Flora of the U.S. Green Building Council spoke on the topic, “Beyond Green Buildings: A Roadmap for Transforming our Built Environment.”

Flora cited three key areas of green building delivery:
• Changing the LEED certification model and the LEED Certification Institute, and contracting with certification entities.
• Creating an easier way of integrating information into the system.
• Change whole structure of how LEED is packaged so that credits can be updated on their own.

She said that we need to be more involved at the federal, local and state levels in changing public policy. Although LEED is adopted internationally, the LEED model still doesn’t adapt everywhere, so work must be done to share the model more globally.

The GIS and BIM Convergence: Broadening Interoperability with Standards

Louis Hecht of the OpenGIS Consortium spoke on the topic, “The GIS and BIM Convergence: Broadening Interoperability with Standards,” citing three areas standards need to address: things, business process and coordination.

The integrated project delivery process is being adopted across the board, said Hecht. “Open standards means agreeing on a common definition of terms and names, attributes, properties and information,” he quoted. Open standardization also means agreeing on a common means of communication.

With regard to open interfaces and interoperability, he said that it’s about balancing users’ needs for compatibility with autonomy and heterogeneity of interoperating systems. “We need to agree on a definition of open interfaces.”

BIM is one of many tools to migrate the market to interoperability, with its method of collecting information once for reuse. The buildingSMART Alliance is working on this approach.

The buildingSMART Alliance, the OGC and Sponsors of the AECOO (Architecture, Engineering, Construction, Owner and Operator) Testbed issued a Request for Quotation (RFQ) and Call for Participation (CFP) for the AECOO-Phase 1 Testbed.

The OGC and buildingSMART are collaborating on the AECOO Testbed to address the productivity problems in the AEC industry which are fragmented by professions and skills.

“Testbeds yield accelerated alignments of industry on solutions using open standards,” explained Hecht. The feedback then goes back to the standards bodies.

Another challenge is to coordinate the testbed with other standards such as IFC. A testbed results in a prototype/alpha software with interoperability “baked in.” It is then submitted to the standards organization knowing that it works in the software.

AECOO-1 strives to incorporate:
• BIM views
• gbXML and EnergyPlus
• SOA

Hecht said that anyone can join the testbed. For more information click here.

More photos from the BE Conference are available on the AECCafe homepage. For the full BE report on geospatial, please see GISWeekly, June 2.

Top News of the Week

Vela Systems, a developer of mobile field software for the AECO (architecture, engineering, contractor and owner) industry, announced that Manhattan Construction, a more than 100-year-old international construction company based in Tulsa, OK, will be using Vela Systems installed on Tablet PCs to help build the largest enclosed football stadium in the United States. Located in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, the stadium's construction marks the continuation of Vela's rapidly growing popularity amongst AECO leaders who are enlisting the solution for its proven abilities to accelerate project delivery, save money and improve work quality.

CADsoft Consulting, Inc. announced that it has become authorized to sell and deliver Autodesk Academic Solutions to higher education and K-12 institutions throughout Arizona, New Mexico and Nevada.

Acquisitions/Agreements/Alliances

Meridian Systems announced a new Independent Software Vendor (ISV) relationship with Data Builder, Inc., an expert and leader in developing integrated document management solutions for general contractors and facilities management companies.

As an authorized Meridian ISV, Data Builder offers technology solutions to Meridian customers and partners that enhance the capabilities of Meridian's Prolog® software. Data Builder provides e-PCS, a secure, ASP-based electronic document management solution that integrates with Prolog software to provide sophisticated document collaboration, workflow support, full text search capabilities and secure access via the Internet.

Bentley Systems, Incorporated announced that it has acquired the global business of Common Point, Incorporated, the pioneer and market leader in software products for construction simulation (ConstructSim) and operations simulation (OpSim). ConstructSim has become widely established in plant projects, has been successfully deployed on building projects, and, along with OpSim, can also be applied in civil infrastructure projects. The integration of Common Point’s technology with Bentley’s ProjectWise Navigator platform and comprehensive portfolio of applications and collaboration servers will enable Bentley to accelerate integrated project delivery for infrastructure projects by closing gaps between design, construction, and operations.

American Reprographics Company announced a marketing agreement with HP to offer HP's Instant Printing technology and wide-format printing devices with PlanWell, ARC's online document management solution for the AEC (architectural, engineering and construction) market.

Announcements

A newly released survey has found consensus among leading AEC principals, counsel and professional liability insurers that many of the industry's current practices, despite being designed to shield architecture and engineering firms from risk exposure, are, in fact, increasing the likelihood of project failure. The research is available in a white paper, "Mitigating Risk in AEC Project Execution: Perspectives from Principals, Counsel and Insurers," by Spar Point Research of Danvers, Mass.

Software developer Newforma, Inc. commissioned Spar Point to conduct the research based on Spar Point's success with a previous Newforma white paper, "Improving AEC Project Execution: Lessons from 11 Industry Leaders." This time the focus of the survey was to investigate the challenge of risk mitigation in project delivery.

Research and Markets has announced the addition of “US Construction Business Applications Expenditures, 2007-2012” to their offering.

This Excel-based Data-rich Deliverable (DRD) that is part of the Construction and Applications Market subscriptions includes market intelligence on IT: Applications expenditures for the construction vertical. The report defines construction as establishments primarily engaged in construction work or services. The report defines applications as business expenditures on server and client-based custom-coded and packaged applications, including productivity, Enterprise Resource Planning and security applications. The Expert Guide for this deliverable is Stephanie Atkinson. Forecasts are from 2007 through 2012 and include annual growth rates, as well as percentage of total market.

The Intergraph Foundation, the philanthropic arm of Intergraph Corp. will provide a $25,000 donation and match additional employee contributions to the American Red Cross China Earthquake Relief Fund to aid survivors and relief efforts of the devastating May 12 earthquake.

Intergraph will integrate its SmartPlant Enterprise plant configuration solution, SmartPlant Instrumentation, with the PAS Integrity/DOC4000 product family to provide plant owners with a consolidated view of their control infrastructure for improved operations management.

Meridian Systems, a software solutions leader for improving capital program and construction project performance, announced that new customer collaboration services are now available on SupportLink, Meridian's technical support website. Meridian customers can now enjoy improved site navigation and a live chat function that allows Prolog and Proliance software users to more effectively address their technical questions and connect with other Meridian customers and partners.

D|C|CADD announced it has earned the coveted Autodesk Premier Solutions Provider (PSP) certification for Architectural Design, an honor reserved only for the highest-achieving, most knowledgeable among the Autodesk Value Added Reseller (VAR) channel. D|C|CADD is the first, and only, Premier Solutions Provider for Building Architecture in Texas. D|C|CADD serves the architectural communities in Dallas-Fort Worth, Austin, San Antonio and Central & South Texas.

Awards

Bentley Systems, Incorporated announced the winners of the 2008 BE Awards of Excellence, which honor the extraordinary work of Bentley users improving and sustaining the world’s infrastructure. Seventeen projects in the professional portion of the program received BE Awards during the BE Conference in Baltimore. These projects set benchmarks and showcase the imagination and technical mastery of the organizations that created them. In addition, for only the second time, a BE Award was presented for Lifetime Achievement. In the academic portion of the program, BE Awards went to the Educator of the Year and the top four student designs. See press release

Intergraph bestowed Icon Awards, its highest customer distinction, upon eight U.S. and international industry and government leaders for their innovative use of and results with enterprise engineering and geospatially powered software.

The Icon Awards were announced in Las Vegas at Intergraph 2008 last week, the largest ever Intergraph international user conference. The awards honor companies and organizations that have deployed and leveraged Intergraph software in a visionary manner to yield results that have significantly contributed to their business and industry. The winners received their awards during the keynote sessions, which also featured Lance Armstrong, seven-time Tour de France winner, athlete and founder of the Livestrong organization dedicated to cancer research and awareness. See Icon Award Winners and Golden Valve Award Winners Read our Intergraph 2008 report in the June 16th issue of AEC Weekly.

Dominik Dreiner’s design of the new headquarters of the Metal and Electrical Industry Association, in Heilbronn, Germany has been awarded the first prize of the AAA Austrian Architecture Award 2008 The award was organized by Messe Wels and the Austrian Architectural Association.

Munich architects Fink+Jocher http://www.fink-jocher.de/ have been awarded one of the most acclaimed prizes for German architecture. The award is conferred biannually by E.ON Ruhrgas AG under the patronage of the Federal Chamber of German Architects.

Financials

Axium Technologies, Inc. announces that it has completed its un-audited financial statements for the period ending March 31, 2008. See press release

People

J.J. Suarez, President and Chief Executive Officer of CSA Group, the largest Hispanic-owned architectural/engineering/planning and environmental (A/E/P&E) services firm in the U.S., was elected Chairman of the Construction Industry Round Table (CIRT) for 2008-2009 at its recent Spring Conference held in Washington, DC. Since the mid 1990s, Dr. Suarez has served in many key capacities within CIRT including Vice Chairman in 2007-2008.

Dexter + Chaney, developer of Spectrum Construction Software, has promoted Curt Westberg to vice president of sales and Bill Neel to vice president of development. Westberg, who joined the company in 1994, had been national sales manager. Neel, a Dexter + Chaney employee since 1992, previously was development manager.

Melvin Hildebrandt, Linbeck Group, LLC vice chairman, has been elected to serve as a board member of Trelligence, Inc., a building information modeling software development company. He also serves on Linbeck’s board of directors and is past president of the Houston chapter of the American Institute of Architects.

New Products

Bentley Systems, Incorporated announced the integration of Bentley Building Electrical Systems, a professional engineering design application in Bentley’s suite of Building Information Modeling (BIM) products, with Visual, the leading lighting design and analysis software from Acuity Brands Lighting. Through this integration, those using Visual for lighting design and analysis will have immediate access to all building geometry and design data in the BIM model.

Bentley Systems, Incorporated announced Bentley OpenPlant PDx Manager, a new software tool built on ISO 15926 that makes existing plant design system data, such as PDS data, open and interoperable with other applications. With Bentley OpenPlant PDx Manager, engineering/procurement/construction firms, owner-operators, and suppliers can connect to a live PDS project and open up the entire PDS project database without affecting the underlying PDS model or data. In addition, they can access in real time all model data and deliverables and extract them to ProjectWise in order to support globally distributed workflows.

Bentley Systems, Incorporated announced the release of Bentley Water V8 XM Edition. This comprehensive water distribution design software helps engineers and GIS professionals in water utilities and municipalities design, document, and manage potable water distribution networks more efficiently. Bentley Water V8 XM provides all the capabilities of Bentley Map including map management, thematic and overlay analysis features, business and topological rules enforcement, and accurate editing.

Intergraph has released SmartPlant Foundation 2008 with significant and unique new engineering collaboration capabilities. “Domain” technology allows multiple disciplines to concurrently work on shared engineering subject matter.

Intergraph’s customers who partnered in the design of SmartPlant Foundation 2008 have indicated that this multiple domain approach has the potential to dramatically improve their business performance. Reduction in overall time, increase in cross-discipline quality and reliability of execution are the effects of this engineering collaboration platform.

Tekla has released its annual main version of Tekla Structures BIM software. The new version 14 includes several improvements towards more user and environmentally-friendly software. Tekla Structures 14 is already in productive use with many Tekla clients.

In addition to more task-oriented user interface and menus, as well as a more flexible and environmentally-friendly (dongle and shipping-free) licensing system, Tekla Structures 14 includes improved tools for managing and sharing a BIM (Building Information Model) between software users and construction project participants. The software now enables working on models twice as big as before without the risk of running out of memory.

IES announced that its Revit integrated VE-Ware is now ready for download at www.iesve.com/ve-ware

IES VE-Ware is a new FREE building energy and carbon assessment software tool that can make a real difference to the green credentials of a building, as well as benchmarking it against the Architecture 2030 Challenge. It is suitable for all building types across worldwide locations. See the related press release for more detailed information.

Informative Graphics Corporation (IGC) announced the release of its Redact-It Enterprise Server software for EMC Documentum. Redact-It intelligently removes privacy information like Social Security numbers, names and phone numbers before making documents available to a wider audience.

With the new version of its structural analysis software, Nemetschek Scia offers comprehensive innovations as well as an improved connection to Allplan BIM 2008. Accordingly, Scia Engineer 2008 features significantly faster response times, for example, during the analysis of concrete and steel components or while refreshing the screen. Support of new standards and additional construction methods makes this structural analysis software even more suitable for work on international projects. Moreover, the new software version also features improved interaction with Allplan and interoperability with other software products.

Events

ZweigWhite's AEC Technology Strategies 2008
Date:	June 12 - 13, 2008
Place:	Green Valley Ranch Resort & Spa Las Vegas, NV USA
This conference is the ninth annual information technology conference for business and IT leaders in architecture, engineering, and construction. The event brings together all the AEC disciplines, gives equal time to the business issues driving technology, and involves both technology managers and business managers from AEC firms. Discover the latest tools and tactics at work in innovative firms today, and learn strategies for adapting and thriving in tomorrow's AEC business.
BIM / Virtual Design Technology Seminar (June 13, 2008 11:30AM - 2 PM )
Date:	June 13, 2008
Place:	Central Florida Builder's Exchange 340 North Wymore, Winter Park, FL 32789 USA
Hosted by 3DCADCO Attend this session to learn about how changing industry trends are affecting the AEC industry, and how the trend toward BIM, Building Information Modeling (Virtual Building) technology is changing the business of architecture and construction: - The process shift from 2D to intelligent 3D modeling - The creation of integrated workflow systems - The reduction of risk through improved coordination - Improved collaboration with engineers and consultants using Autodesk products
CAD'08
Date:	June 23 - 27, 2008
Place:	Caribe Royale Resort and Conventon Center Orlando, FL USA
Welcome to CAD'08, the 2008 International CAD Conference and Exhibition.The conference is aimed at CAD researchers, educators, developers, vendors, and the business community dealing with CAD technology and its financial issues. The exhibition is open to all CAD businesses including software houses, hardware manufacturers, vendors, e-businesses, educators, publishers and sectors from various government agencies. CAD'08 has tutorial presentations, parallel paper sessions, product demonstrations, and several forms of exhibits.
AutoCAD Civil 3D Test Drive
Date:	July 7, 2008
Place:	Mt. Laurel Center, 309 Fellowship Rd Suite 200, Mt. Laurel, NJ 08054 USA
Would you like to see how to intelligently link design and production drafting, greatly reducing the time it takes to implement changes? How about learning ways to streamline office processes, increase project capacity and improve customer service? Join us for this software overview to see how to complete projects faster, smarter, and more accurately. A complimentary lunch will be served from 12–1pm.
Concrete: Construction's Sustainable Option
Date:	July 8 - 10, 2008
Place:	Dundee, Scotland, United Kingdom
In the long series of concrete congresses since 1986, the Trade Fair has grown to become the focal point of the event. Concrete producers, material suppliers, project contractors, instrument manufacturers, consultancies, publishers, research, educational, and professional institutions, as well as local and government bodies are all represented. Their fields of competence cover the full spectrum of subject areas of the congress and this provides an exceptional opportunity to substantiate the knowledge attained at the sessions by the acclaimed and very popular technology demonstrations.
DesignDC '08: Leading ReNEWal
Date:	July 8 - 10, 2008
Place:	Ronald Reagan Building & International Trade Center Washington, DC USA
Don't miss out on the fourth annual DesignDC, July 8-10, 2008. This year we are continuing with our green theme but with a twist: looking at how sustainable design and adaptive reuse, historic preservation and downtown revitalization can all work together.

You can find the full AECCafe event calendar here.

To read more news, click here.

-- Susan Smith, AECCafe.com Managing Editor.

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