This is our final week of AECCafe Voice Industry Predictions for 2022, which brings us to some exciting merging with other technologies such as GIS technology in the digital twin arena. Construction has been slow to adopt in past years, but the advent of augmented reality is changing that paradigm. Artificial intelligence and machine learning are part and parcel of the digital twin, so we will hear more from them in 2022. And what about construction project management software? Can it become easier to use, without undue training costs, and render a quicker return on investment? Take a look at what these professionals are predicting for 2022….
Much of 2021’s important news had to do with response to climate change, coupled with the Covid-19 response for businesses. Technologies have been in place for many years to respond, but the time is now, and actually the time is yesterday, to respond to these critical social and environmental issues. Digital twin technology and artificial intelligence are front and center in addressing these challenges. Reducing the world’s carbon footprint is a major priority for most organizations and technologies are being lined up to address this priority.
Andrew Anagnost, President and CEO of Autodesk gave the keynote at the general session of the second Autodesk University 2021 Virtual in October. He spoke of how customers and employees had to experience a decade of change in 18 months that some were not ready for. “Even before social distancing and remote – platforms were connecting consumers and producers, and mobile devices were bringing everyone together,” said Anagnost. “Sometimes it’s felt like technology has kept us apart. We saw human ingenuity at a greater pace and scale. We face uncertainty. You make things that make tomorrow a better place. Everyone here are innovators and solve big and small problems, and technology is a force multiplier of your ingenuity.
At a technical session held at the Virtual Esri User Conference 2021, in July, entitled “GIS + BIM for AEC Project Delivery & Operations,” expert presenters Steven Santovasi, Erika Boccian, Rafael Lucero and Anthony Renteria provided a look at the value of BIM and GIS for project delivery as well as for other aspects of AEC, such as schedule data, asset lifecycle management and the features of the upcoming ArcGIS GeoBIM.
While Bentley Systems has had an Academic Program for some time, it has been reawakened, according to Katriona Lord-Levins, chief success officer at Bentley. “It has been brought into the times we’re in, and to meet the needs that we have to create a talent pipelines for our customers and ourselves,” said Lord-Levins. “Not only do we want to help students develop their engineering skills that will help them in the real world, but we also want to get people excited about the possibilities of the future.”
Year in Infrastructure 2020 Executive Perspectives held on October 29th, 2020 with Greg Bentley and Satya Nadella featured discussions with the following executives:
Greg Bentley, CEO, Bentley Systems
Satya Nadella, CEO, Microsoft
Nicholas Cumins, Chief Product Officer, Bentley Systems
Katriona Lord-Levins, Chief Success Officer, SVP, Bentley Systems
Chris Bradshaw, Chief Marketing Officer, Bentley Systems
To begin with, Greg Bentley spoke about the past year at Bentley Systems:
Greg Bentley, CEO, Bentley Systems
“This year has been about confluence of infrastructure and resilience. We have been a privately held company for 36 years and now publicly held. Those interested can view our investor relations website with all our performance listed there. BSY is the ticker symbol for Bentley on NASDAQ. Usage in our apps hit a trough earlier in the year yet returned to earlier levels by June. Infrastructure engineering is mission critical; professionals are able to be virtualized, advancement in going digital is greater this year as well as in 4D construction modeling. We’ll continue to see that grows every year as construction is about occupancy of space and time and that’s ever more important after a pandemic and forever.
800 Bentley colleagues are working on solutions with digital twins on perils we may not know and anticipate. Our own colleagues have been virtualized working at home, working on work-at-home for users as well.
Digital Twins for Infrastructure Resilience Infrastructure
Infrastructure resilience sustains our economy and environment. Infrastructure is advanced by infrastructure engineering and empowered by infrastructure engineering software, so we recognize our responsibility as an infrastructure engineering software company. For investors we inform them, break revenues down by end market. (more…)
This year’s Bentley Year In Infrastructure event was as most conferences this year, held remotely. Media representatives from over 28 countries attended the event.
Vectorworks Design Day was held this week, outlining the new Vectorworks 2021 release and the theme of “simplicity to design the complex” that characterizes that release.
In a webinar recently presented by Emesent, the discussion was entitled “Smarter Lidar Technology for Infrastructure and AEC: better data, greater insights.”
Peter Dickinson, project manager for Emesent and Business Development manager for the Americas Dave Jaunay introduced customers who were using Emesent’s Hovermap sensor system for various challenging environments. It has been used extensively in mining and underground environments and land surveying.
The company Emesent is based in Brisbane, Australia with a staff of 38 but rapidly growing to meet global demands. The company aims to solve the problem of collection of data – in GPS-denied or challenging environments. The need to automate the collection of data, gave birth to the Hovermap for mine and roads, tunneling, indoor mapping and search and rescue, anywhere where maintaining a signal for GNSS solutions is problematic.
Bentley Systems held the Rail Virtual Press Briefing entitled “Going Digital in Rail and Advancing BIM through Digital Twins” this week, featuring presentations from Bentley executives, Steve Cockerell, Industry Marketing Director, Rail and Transit, Eduardo Lazzarotto, Director of Project Management, and Teresa Elliott, Industry Marketing Direction, Digital Cities.
