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Susan Smith
Susan Smith has worked as an editor and writer in the technology industry for over 16 years. As an editor she has been responsible for the launch of a number of technology trade publications, both in print and online. Currently, Susan is the Editor of GISCafe and AECCafe, as well as those sites’ … More » AECCafe 2020 Year End Technology Wrap-UpDecember 19th, 2020 by Susan Smith
It goes without saying that the Covid-19 virus has upended our lives and industries around the world beyond most people’s imagination and not in a good way. Most people I speak with want 2020 to end, eager to herald the start of a new year and new beginnings.
 Exterior view of the Autodesk Technology Center in Toronto, Canada. As a center for emerging technologies, Autodesk Toronto is creating, developing, and evaluating the potential to push technologies into new realms shaping the future of making things. Multi-disciplinary teams in this space are exploring everything from virtual reality and generative design that will impact the future of concept design and storytelling to technologies like the internet of things, AI and machine learning that will help our customers magine, design, and create a better world. The levels to which this virus has affected the AEC industry are, of course, unprecedented. Every technology event since March has been held virtually. Various reports have been published and AEC technology companies have been working around the clock to make work-from-home easier, as well as make workplaces safer. The truth is, you can’t build infrastructure without people on the ground, onsite, overseeing the building and actually stacking bricks and mortar. We know how to do a lot of things but that remains essential. Infrastructure is not a LEGO set you can assemble in your own home. What have emerged as technologies to help buoy and sustain markets during these times include
Given that, technology companies foster a positive outlook on the future. Forecasters Technavio predict that “Although the growth of the global construction market will offer immense growth opportunities, challenges associated with open-source platforms will challenge the growth of the market participants. To make the most of the opportunities, market vendors should focus more on the growth prospects in the fast-growing segments, while maintaining their positions in the slow-growing segments. The growth of the global construction market has been instrumental in driving the growth of the market. However, the high cost of AEC software might hamper market growth.” They note Autodesk Inc., Bentley Systems Inc., Dassault Systemes SE, Hexagon AB, Nemetschek SE, Newforma Inc., Odoo SA, Oracle Corp., Procore Technologies Inc., and Trimble Inc. are some of the major market participants. They are looking at a forecast period of between 2020-2024. it is poised to grow by USD 2.87 billion, progressing at a CAGR of 8% during the forecast period for what they term the AECS – architectural engineering and construction solutions market. Reimagining the Possible or Virtual Creation Andrew Anagnost, CEO of Autodesk talked about how important resilience is in these times at their first Autodesk University Virtual 2020, how we are dealing with fragile economies, ecosystems and supply chains. The idea is to achieve a new possible. “Our opportunity and future is going to be bigger on the other side of the crisis,” he said. The theme of the conference, “Reimagine Possible,” takes into account how people have had to reimagine and customize to meet shifting demands and needs. Along with this, Autodesk is putting a lot of attention on virtual creation, not just in the entertainment industry, but beyond the construction industry, in the factory floor and production studio. “In AEC, it used to be when a building project moved to construction rich information was lost just when it was most needed,” said Anagnost. “Look how much it has changed in the last year. Healthcare and infrastructure have skyrocketed. Social distancing is keeping more people in more controlled environments, digitalization of construction was happening already but not quickly enough. Construction will be permanently digitized when we get to the other side of this.” Because so many people are staying home now, the demand for entertainment exploded. There is a need for more stories for broader and bigger audiences. Now entertainment has grown from just the physical world to a blend of physical and digital worlds. The line between physical and digital are being redrawn in all ecosystems, according to Anagnost. The need to digitalize for coordinating workflows and teams increased as well as the need to coordinate work from anywhere. “Data will need to flow from design to construction and directly into the digital twin, back cycle from into hands of architects, owners from the entire lifecycle of the asset, so how do we get there? The falloff in manufacturing, and factory closures broke fragile supply chains. Digital Twins and Facilities Management IMAGINiT Director of Facilities Management Peter Costanzo conducted a panel discussion at Autodesk University entitled “Transform your Business with Digital Twins.” Topics covered included digital twin definition: “a digital replica of potential and actual physical assets “physical” twin, with potential data sources:
It involves processes, people, places, systems and devices (IoT). In building the Empire State Building, Costanzo said, constructors were lucky to have phones, much technology to transform facilities. He thinks long term in CAD to BIM, and how this works over time. Now he thinks more about the digital twin. Today users can leverage digital twins for facilities management by linking BIM models to something like the Archibus facilities management system. “Autodesk has wonderful design tools, but the company needed facilities management as in, what was there and not what was supposed to be there,” said Costanzo. “Autodesk Tandem is a gamechanger to all this. Tandem provides different ways to get information over to the owner and the process is streamlined. brings project data together from its many sources, formats, and phases, to create a data-rich digital hub that tracks asset data from design through operations – a digital twin.” Digital twins go further than a building, said Costanzo. “Think of digital twins of jet engines, stadiums, cities, but here we will focus on a building as it exists in a context of something. We will focus that information in spaces, assets and you may bring more information in from other databases.” Autodesk has dynamic up-to-date replicas of potential and actual physical assets. IoT will have a huge impact on facilities. Before it was difficult for the facilities manager to manage all those assets. The city is a collection of buildings, roads and other elements that have relationships. Now managers can leverage assets they couldn’t tie together before and enjoy tremendous cost savings.  Reviewing asset details for more informed operational decision making Repurposing an Exhibition Center as a Covid-19 Hospital Perhaps more a sign of the times for AEC than any other building projects is the repurposing of infrastructure into Covid-19 hospitals. James Hepburn, engineering principal at Building Design Partnership (BDP), recalled one night in early March he was brainstorming with the chief executive of Great Ormond Street Hospital in London – to find ways to meet the city’s expected need for intensive care beds. Covid-19 cases were growing and there wasn’t time to build anything new. They needed to rehab and repurpose an existing space. “One night in early March, I was with the chief executive of Great Ormond Street Hospital in London. Brainstorming ways to meet the city’s expected need for intensive care beds,” said Hepburn. “Covid-19 cases were growing, there wasn’t time to build something new. We needed to reshape and repurpose an existing space. So we asked ourselves, what about an exhibition center? What about London’s ExCel center? Could a 45,000 square meter convention space become an emergency hospital?” BDP explored the feasibility of the project and prepared a technical paper for the National Health Service (NHS). The army supported the concept and the government green-lighted what would eventually become the first NHS Nightingale Hospital. “We joined the team at the ExCel center with a brief to deliver 500 ICU beds within a week, and 3,500 more in the weeks to come,” explained Hepburn. “Nothing had been done on this scale before, but we knew we could do it if we focused on being as agile and productive as possible. We coordinated our workflows in Revit to design quick layouts, repurposing Revit families from previous healthcare projects to speed the design. A team of BDP architects and engineers collaborated with other fantastic consultants, designers, specialists, and contractors. We printed our initial designs, iterated rapidly, and got sign off from the client. Within a day we had a plan in place. There were huge numbers of people involved from dozens of organizations, including experts from the NHS, contractors from every conceivable field, and even the army. A leadership team guided by the military convene twice a day, once in the morning and once at night. And when the teams leads presented and worked through design and construction challenges in real time, it was clear from the outset that to hit that deadline, we would need to design and build in parallel. We needed a design that was modular, repeatable, and it could be customized and built on demand. Our design decisions were based primarily on the availability of materials. The team needed to procure 4,000 lights, 116,000 meters of cable, 8,000 oxygen terminals, and 20 kilometers of medical copper gas tube, as well as the hospital beds and ventilators. Everyone onsite pushed hard, working, 15, 16 hour days in a fast changing landscape. Revit’s ability to change one design detail and have it propagate across all systems saved us a lot of time. And while the team were focused on fitting out the hospital quickly, we also had to keep in mind that with any luck we would need to disassemble everything.” Hepburn said hopefully at some point soon the ExCel center will be able to return to its former state. But for now the team is relying on virtual creations of the space to understand patients’ flow through the Nightingale Hospital. “We would design in a place where sick people would come to be cared for, so we needed to make sure every part of the patient treatment was accounted for,” Hepburn said. “The team taped a to-scale plan of the center onto the floor and consulted doctors and nurses with every step of a patient’s journey. This is a brilliant solution, but difficult to replicate nationally. Other teams from across the UK were hard at work on other hospital locations. We wanted to pass on what we’d learned at the ExCel Center to help our colleagues be even more agile and productive. We created the Nightingale manual, which digitized everything we’d learned. While we may have worked largely on paper, the Revit model was always our source of the truth at NHS Nightingale, and the other hospitals as well.” At other sites, project teams used BIM 360 and PlanGrid to track progress, share drawings of markups, work through installation problems and ensure quality. Ultimately, the NHS Nightingale team delivered the first 500 hospital beds in nine days, and 3,500 more in the following weeks.  FutureON Growth in Construction and Reality Modeling “With our SYNCHRO construction modeling applications and our focus on safety in terms of social distancing, we expect continued growth in 4D construction modeling. We are in the process of developing a Resilience Response Force so that we can have readiness, response, and recovery with resilience through Digital Twins,” said Bentley CEO Greg Bentley. For investors Bentley broke down revenues by infrastructure sector and disciplines – commercial/ facilities, industrial/resources/roads and bridges, electric transmission and distribution, municipal and mapping, rail and transit, water and wastewater, which constitute public works and utilities. CEO Greg Bentley spoke about revenues by infrastructure and discipline referring to data from the Oxford Economics Outlook – Global Infrastructure Spending 2016 through 2040 and the importance of the project lifecycle and the asset lifecycle. “We believe we lead the market in roads and bridges, and public works and utilities,” noted Bentley.
Infrastructure Spending through 2016-2040 comprises
 “Digital twins can merge information from a variety of sources for immersive visualization and analytics visibility.” Bentley Systems, Inc. Reality Modeling has grown 35% since 2018 in the YII nominated projects. ITwin services brings systems together with applications. “Where we are now is being able to converge to 4D digital twins, federated and aligned simulation to complete the lifecycle and make it evergreen,” said Greg Bentley. Bentley Systems telegraphs a message that digital twins can be used by everyone now, and the cloud, while with us for awhile now, is the technology upon which everything is reliant in today’s world. Open Workflows Vectorworks outlined the new Vectorworks 2021 release and the theme of “simplicity to design the complex” that characterizes that release.  Vectorworks Graphic Module Cache Vectorworks Graphic Module Cache Dr. Biplab Sarkar, CEO of Vectorworks, Inc. a wholly owned subsidiary of the Nemetschek Group, spoke about the meaning of “simplicity to design the complex.” What does that mean? The short answer he says, is that the ideas will be quick to flow. The mission and strategy is to be inspired by design, to lessen inherent complexities of building designs and simplify and build “creative solutions that exceed client demand and expectations,” said Sarkar. “Centered on design phases, we invest in building best-in-class technologies. We do this to create software that is simple to learn and use. It allows creative freedom. How will we deliver on this promise? Start with quality and performance. Your feedback, pain points, your wishes, every year between 60-70% of the Vectorworks projects started with you.  Smart Markers Smart Markers We’ve increased our analytics investment to meet the demand of over 1 million transactions every day. Next we modernize invested and reengineered our technology to keep nimble, cutting edge.” Graphics performance and visualization are upgraded as several years ago, Vectorworks predicted the way the technology was headed and fully supports multi-threading and fast performance. “We believe our focus should be on designs not design software, enhanced user experience, not just making things look prettier, reducing mouse clicks, on-scheme widgets,” said Sarkar. “Complexity surrounding BIM is real. Our focus is on making BIM easier to use and incorporating information and geometrics from any source, making it easier for the project team, consultants, to spend more time on design and less time managing the project.” Mixed Reality on the Construction Site
His webinar was very timely in that perhaps now more than ever before, the building industry looks to ways to transform construction and connect constructible data between office and field sites. Mixed Reality Use Cases for Onsite Construction – ROI Overview and Customer Interview “We have a bunch of people on a construction site working together, and we need clear visibility into what each other are doing,” said Lawver. “Trimble has acquired a lot of companies to fill gaps all the way from the facility management of that building, sharing constructible data. Not everyone is using Trimble products, so it doesn’t matter what point solution you’re using for any given task, and all that information flows into one hub, Trimble Connect, our construction platform. Everyone lives in that ecosystem – they communicate and collaborate within Trimble Connect.” In connecting the physical and digital worlds, Lawver says XR tools bridge the physical gap, connecting constructible data between office and field. You can add one more layer – mixed and augmented reality to make office data actionable on the site and provide ongoing insight back to the office.  SketchUp with the Microsoft Hololens demo The Trimble XR10 with HoloLens 2 snaps onto your hardhat, and is put through testing the body in the world to make sure it is safe. You can still use hearing protection, as you want mixed reality hardware to fit in with your work process. You can merge this tool right into your day-to-day process without sacrificing safety measures. Trimble teamed up with Mobius, a bone conduction system that enables workers in very loud construction sites, to hear a remote assistance phone call. It works in the back of your skull in conjunction with your earphones. Working Remotely Matt Mason, President and CEO at Rand IMAGINiT Technologies, credits Autodesk BIM360 with the way to work in AEC remotely in his look at 2020:
Summary These are just a few of the areas in which the AEC industry has morphed and demonstrated its resilience to the changing times. We are all looking forward to 2021, to the hoped for eradication or diminishing of Covid-19, the resurgence of industry sectors that have dipped as a result of the rocky economy. We don’t know exactly what the next year will hold, but come January look for the pundits to offer glimpses into what 2021 holds. Until then, have a blessed, safe and joyous holiday season!
Tags: 3D, 3D cities, AEC, architects, architecture, Autodesk, Autodesk Revit, Bentley Systems, BIM, building, building design, building information modeling, CAD, collaboration, construction, covid-19, design, engineering, engineers, facilities management, infrastructure, reality capture, visualization Categories: 2D, 3D, 3D PDF, AEC, AEC training, AECCafe, apps, ARCHIBUS, architecture, Architecture 2030, Autodesk, Autodesk University 2020, BIM, building information modeling, civil information modeling, Cloud, collaboration, construction, construction project management, engineering, field, field solutions, file sharing, IFC, infrastructure, Internet of Things, IoT, managed services, mixed reality, mobile, project management, reality capture, simulation, site planning, sustainable design, traffic simulation, Vectorworks, virtual reality, visualization, wearable devices, Year In Infrastructure 2020 |
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Jordan Lawver, Portfolio Manager, Mixed Reality for Trimble spoke for the Trimble Buildings Basecamp on the topic, “Mixed Reality Use Cases for Onsite Construction – ROI Overview and Customer Interview.”
