There is a growing recognition in the collective AEC industry that geography provides a common language for collaborating on projects. This is significant as geography allows us to better understand how infrastructure such as buildings, roads, bridges, and utilities that need to be built or rehabilitated are connected to each other, as well as the conditions of the space in which they exist.
Bringing GIS technologies and BIM processes together provides a broader and deeper understanding of infrastructure in the larger context of the built and natural environments by integrating information and content. A solution enabled by this integration allows transportation planners and designers to use real-world data to perform traffic simulations and analysis in order to redesign the most unsafe roads in their cities. This integration can also take advantage of data to gain more insight into natural conditions impacting a site, such as understanding the flood sensitivity of an area-impacting decisions about an infrastructure’s location, orientation and construction materials.
A case in point is how one of our customers (Mott MacDonald) is integrating BIM and GIS data and technologies in their work to rehabilitate the lower Catskill Aqueduct in New York resulting in an innovative approach to bringing in existing data, integrating new captured data to produce information that can be easily indexed and retrieved, supporting a more successful delivery of the project.
Also Read: BIM adoption around the world: how good are we?
Technology integration is the future
Investments are being made heavily around the applications of manufacturing techniques in construction, incorporating AR/VR into planning, design building and operations as well as the introduction of machine learning and AI. All of these technological advancements collectively will help transform the AEC industry, a sector which hasn’t seen major productivity increases for well over 20 years.
It is inevitable that AI and Big Data will be what powers innovations in AEC processes and workflows. GIS and BIM data brought together to create a “digital twin” of a project and its environment will allow for better designs and make both construction and operation much more efficient. Analyzing all this data will help professionals detect patterns about the sites existing environment. As this information gets richer, new insights can be derived to improve the efficiency of individual assets (one intersection) or an entire system of assets (road network in a city).
Autodesk is contributing by providing AEC professionals with a more streamlined process to leverage geospatial information to create better context models, thus enabling better designs and more operationally efficient assets. As a result, we have been driving new partnerships in many areas of innovation to achieve this. Autodesk is bringing that knowledge from manufacturing to AEC and our Esri partnership allows us to improve the way we create spatially accurate digital representations of the physical. Our current plan is to expand the integration further into our detailed design applications like Civil 3D but also connect GIS data into our cloud BIM platform.
‘What’, ‘where’ and ‘why’ of sustainable infrastructure
The understanding of infrastructure assets within the larger contextual environment enables better-informed and smarter decision-making, improved stakeholder engagement, accelerated project timelines and reduced costs. The ability to fully take advantage of geospatial intelligence in design and build processes will ultimately be a key driver for innovations such as generative design, optimization routines and AI. These will enable the AEC industry to meet the growing needs of our cities through better planning, efficient use of resources, and improved understanding of what needs to be built, where and why.
We want to be part of this evolution and will continue to focus on building solutions that will enable our customers to imagine, design and create a better world.
Also Read: Location Data is Today a Pure Necessity – Alain De Taeye, TomTom
