Autodesk University 2018: Focus on Automation

Autodesk University 2018 in November in Las Vegas, opened with its usual youthful cool vigor, dancing and mix music for the opening session. CEO of Autodesk, Andrew Anagnost, presented opening remarks, outlining the company vision of automation.

Autodesk’s message has shifted from infrastructure to the things we make over the years. It is more of a manufacturing message. While automation has a broader application than manufacturing, Anagnost’s message brings to mind the importance of eliminating repetitive tasks with automation and allowing people to work more efficiently.

“Automation changes the very things we’re capable of making,” said Anagnost. “The things we make perform better, last longer and are more meaningful. Autodesk is changing the way we work. Automation allows us opportunity to create more meaningful work. Automation provides an opportunity to make more things, make them better with less negative impact on the world. More demand is inevitable, and there is a need for more with less negative impact. We’re going to focus on the opportunity of better, do better work, to make things better.”

He spoke of making food. “In 1900, 40% of the U.S. worked in farming. Only 2% work on farms today. One hundred years ago, the value chain for food started at the farm and ended at the market. Now it extends way beyond, to cooking shows, plant based meats, and gluten free and vegan too. We have more access to food than ever before. Automation is able to use food more effectively. We have a new ecosystem of jobs, better jobs. The transportation industry is the business of moving people. There are four million people in the U.S. whose jobs involve driving. There will be fewer people employed driving as fewer are making cars. Mobility advisors, fleet advisors, are all working on challenge on moving people more efficiently than ever before. With it so jobs will change.”

Looking at new roles and jobs for the future, it’s important to note how many BIM managers and sustainability coordinators we have today as opposed to twenty years ago. Ecosystems and jobs have changed according to needs.

“Automating repetitive tasks doesn’t make the tasks redundant,” said Anagnost. “Removing these tasks means we have more time to focus on what’s important.”

The family farm wasn’t going to feed the world, but now they can, said Anagnost. Organic farmers are the family farmers of today.

Anagnost recounts his growing up in Los Angeles and dubs it, “the worst best city in the world.” LA is a diverse and dynamic place, and LA county has more manufacturing jobs than any other county in the U.S. “More comes at real cost,” said Anagnost. “Alongside LA’s population diversity, is density, and incredible congestion. LA roads are the worst in the country. Commuters spend 2 years in traffic. What happens when they host the Olympics?

The population will be twice as big in 2024. Two million people will descend upon LA. It will take 10 years of planning for 16 days of competition. Like so many host cities, the legacy of the games will live on long after they’re over, and that can be positive or negative.”

To make sure that was a satisfying experience that satisfied the long term needs of LA’s citizens, maybe automation could play a role.

After most Olympics, athletes’ buildings are often turned into low income housing. Reconciling low income with athletes needs has always been challenging. Automation may be able to help this, by exploring the dozens of design options and choosing the best one. Being able to work on everything in the model perhaps a better outcome, on time and on spec could be delivered.

“Even the owner gets real time insights about what’s happening,” said Anagnost.  “Automation will capture all the changes, sending the right data to the right people at the right time.

The final model will actually capture what was represented. When automation means we can spend less time on non-creative and non-productive tasks, we’ll understand how to build stuff.”

In a best case scenario, when all the digital assets are combined together everyone can look at a digital twin of the city, that aggregates data in real time. The city can look out for hazards, congestion and stop them before they happen. Automation makes this better for very one – better insights, and knowledge outcomes.

Is anyone looking at this today?

SNC-Lavalin Atkins, a design, engineering and project management firm seeks to use automation to change the way they work.

Atkins worked on the London 2012 Olympics. Challenges included the early stage of design process, managing multiple stakeholders, working with teams of varying levels of technical skills. Obstacles got in the way of how they collaborated and they found they spent way too much time redoing design.

Miscommunication, last minute changes increased complexity and project generation. They had difficulty controlling their costs. Major design changes would mean they had to redo everything – schedule, etc., resulting in large construction overrun.

If they could have involved the client earlier in the decision making process, they could have made well-informed and real time decisions, according to a company spokesperson.

Since then, Atkins has developed an app that takes full advantage of advanced collaboration.

Their app Caterpillar evolves the napkin sketch concept and thereby allows them to create ideas and fits them to solutions, transforms sketches in real time to massing study links to analytics. This app reduces time for the design team.

“I can look back on our experience working on London Olympics 2012 and reflect on how delivery would have been improved spending more time innovating,” said one company spokesman. “During the early design stage, a huge amount of time was spent on data accumulation. All was generically managed individually and there was no way to reconcile it together. Caterpillar gives us a single source of truth, and we are connected to the app as microservices. We can interact directly with data in one centralized location. Working on the Olympic Games is challenging. There is a large amount of time between conception and delivery, but a collective vision of the future is never easy to predict. There is no flexibility in this project. With so many teams involved, decisions and time constraints, by facilitating faster design duration, Caterpillar speeds up the whole process. Is the stadium in the right location? Moving it around, you can see its impact on land, costs, etc., and this allows us to make quicker and more informed decisions through simulation.”

Caterpillar provides information from a centralized dashboard. It can be used from anywhere on any device. Users can query any zone of the project and run analytics, can drill down to the root of the data source.

This app is in the development stage. Moving from a linear workflow to real time one is inspiring and hopefully this will be fully operational well before the 2024 Olympics.

Tags: 3D, 3D cities, 3D printing, AEC, architects, architecture, AutoCAD, Autodesk, BIM, building information modeling, CAD, collaboration, construction, design, engineering, engineers, infrastructure, Open BIM

Categories: 2D, 3D, 3D printing, AEC, AECCafe, architecture, AutoCAD, Autodesk, BIM, building information modeling, civil information modeling, Cloud, construction, construction project management, consumerization, engineering, field, field solutions, file sharing, infrastructure, integrated project delivery, Internet of Things, IoT, lidar, openBIM, point clouds, project management, simulation, site planning, sustainable design, traffic simulation, virtual reality, visualization

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