Bentley Systems hosted its Spring Update Conference Call this week about the progress of the company, with a focus on Digital Twin technology. In addition were two product announcements and the acquisition of Keynetix, a UK-headquartered provider of cloud-based software for capturing, visualizing, modeling, and sharing of geotechnical data.
With OpenSite Designer, users can create intelligent 3D models for civil site projects complete with site information, terrain data, parking lots, building pads, driveways, sidewalk, parcel layout and related site features.
Unfortunately, climate change is occurring at such a rapid rate that technology is racing to keep up with it. The built environment currently accounts for 40% of the world’s energy use, meaning buildings and cities have the potential to make the biggest impact in reducing carbon emissions globally.
Digital Twins – are they taking the AEC technology world by storm? IDC recently noted that by 2020, 30% of global 2000 companies will be using data from Digital Twins to improve organizational productivity by as much as 25%.
According to the 2018 Gartner Hype Cycle, Digital Twin is a trend that is now approaching the “Peak of Inflated Expectations” and is estimated to hit the “Plateau of Productivity” within 5 to 10 years. Image courtesy of Gartner, Inc.
Welcome to the second installation of our series of AECCafe Industry Predictions for 2019. This week we have a number of submissions focusing on Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning implementations as primary technologies featured for 2019. The trend has already begun but definitely will be shaping the AEC industry in the year to come and beyond. As Tibor Szolnoki of GRAPHISOFT says, “Augmented Reality becomes common practice: in collaborative design processes, in job-site applications, and in consumer applications (like home-design solutions).”
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.
AECCafe will focus on specific editorial for 2019, so be sure to check in with our Editorial Calendar to find out when might be a good time for your story to be shown. Throughout the year, we provide space for Current Events, as the technology industry is evolving, and we can’t know at the time of this writing just what will be new, groundbreaking and/or disruptive in the coming year.
The Bentley Year In Infrastructure Conference held in London this year at the Hilton London Metropole attracted over 1,200 attendees, a record number for that location and event. The company advanced its theme of “Going Digital” with the inauguration of Digital Twins and iTwin Services. iTwin Services are digital twin cloud services for infrastructure projects and assets, that can be transparently provisioned within Bentley’s Connected Data Environment (CDE) for ProjectWise and AssetWise users.
Bentley Year In Infrastructure 2018 Awards Ceremony and Dinner
The built environment is increasingly more digitized, relying heavily on large building models to hold all aspects of a building project. Thus, the need for BIM Interoperability is greater as the necessity grows for stakeholders to be able to access the information inside these complex and huge models.
ABDCE_disciplines: AECOsim Building Designer, Bentley’s multi-discipline BIM application, provides architectural, structural, electrical, and mechanical tools so you can coordinate your designs better across disciplines with a streamlined workflow.
For AEC firms, it is very common to use multiple software products within the same organization, as well as outside the organization. No single BIM software solution or integrated system can fulfill the requirements of the AEC industry. All these products throughout the design process need to be able to communicate with one another.
Standards organizations have come forward to suggest that they have the answer to interoperability in the BIM world. But currently what most vendors are able to achieve is perhaps an increase in interoperability. Does anyone offer total interoperability?
Some of our respondents define BIM interoperability in this way:
“Interoperability is about handing over the right amount of information, to the right people at the right time,” says David Lash, product manager, Trimble, Tekla Structures Division. “It’s about hitting milestones for people who want to stay up to date with the wider project, even on a daily basis.”
“Communication, communication, communication,” says Joe Eichenseer, director, Building Lifecycle Solutions, North America IMAGINiT. “Interoperability allows us to communicate better and reduce or eliminate the chance of translation errors between systems.”
Responsibilities of the Vancouver Fraser Port Authority are vast, as they manage stewardship of federal port lands in and around Vancouver, British Columbia.
The port authority oversees and manages over 16,000 hectares of water, more than 1,000 hectares of land, and approximately 350 kilometers of shoreline, bordering 16 municipalities and intersecting the asserted and established territories and treaty lands of several Coast Salish First Nations.
The port authority’s mandate includes handling permits for all projects for proposed federal port lands use and is responsible for real estate management. It also manages infrastructure development designed to support growth and efficient operations.
In order to manage all this, the port authority maintains a repository of AutoCAD drawings. They have been AutoCAD Map 3D and Civil 3D users for a long time.
Maintaining source drawings from many systems such as water, communication, electrical, storm, sewer, and more is what the Vancouver Fraser Port Authority’s Spatial Data Group does on a daily basis. Team members create plans based in these systems and want to query features from each of them. One of the primary problems was that those features could be unintentionally removed from the source drawing if the user didn’t detach it before saving the working file. It could then be gone forever. The team really wanted a solution that could automatically create an audit trail displaying everyone who had modified a file.
Joe Hedrick, manager, Infrastructure Solutions for IMAGINiT, answered some questions for AECCafe Voice on how the port authority found a solution for tracking and safeguarding its CAD drawings in the form of Autodesk Vault.
The built environment is increasingly more digitized, relying heavily on large building models to hold all aspects of a building project. Thus, the need for BIM Interoperability is greater as the necessity grows for stakeholders to be able to access the information inside these complex models.
Bay Bridge East Span Seismic Safety Project To prove the project was viable, the California Department of Transportation shared detailed 3D designs with potential contracting firms.
