Autodesk Addresses Infrastructure Challenges at Many Scales

Written by Matt Ball Tuesday, 03 May 2011 19:46

Autodesk has been developing the tools to address infrastructure design, planning and mapping for quite some
time. With their latest releases, they are creating closer connections between the workflows in these software
products for more holistic approaches. V1 Editor Matt Ball spoke with Paul McRoberts, vice president  of the
infrastructure product line group at Autodesk at the recent AEC Press Days event in their Waltham, Mass. office.
The conversation covered the approach of the infrastructure product line, the way products address issues at
different geographic scales, and the benefits of a model-based approach.

V1: You touched on the idea of the evolution of BIM as being a broader term than just a building. How has the
concept, and the way that Autodesk addresses this, evolved?

McRoberts: If you look at everything that we’re working on, whether it’s the Civil3D environment, the Revit
environment, Map3D, and Galileo, the core is an information base. If you look at the history of the computer-aided
design software industry, it’s about creating the graphic and the information resided somewhere else. Now,
having the connection between the graphic and the information, we’re starting to extend the information
associated with the graphic.

While James Moore from HDR mentioned the use of SketchUp, my first reaction to that was that its a drawing and
doesn’t know what it is or where it is. That information piece flows really naturally if you’re using Galileo to sketch
in your building, road, or infrastructure concepts , then moving the data to Map 3D, and Civil 3D, because it is all
tied to a coordinate system, and tied to information. When we look at the building environment, and the whole
Revit phenomenon around BIM, it plays nicely into the whole. It’s not just about the building, it’s about the rich
information in the model, and information flow tied around the whole industry.

The information flow has been lacking for the past 20 years. It has been a piece here and a piece there, either
done pre- or post-process, but not done in-process. Now we’re doing visualization in process, and you’re getting
real information back from your analysis. Energy analysis is a good example. It used to be done at the end of the
building design, which really told you how poorly your building would behave, because it was too late to make a
change. Now, with early conceptual energy analysis with Green Building Studio and Vasari, you’re getting early
feedback that defines the approach to getting to the goal that you want to achieve.

In the civil engineering infrastructure planning area, I need to start with an integrated analysis piece about water
and water flow for instance before I get to the idea of design. Once I get to the idea of design it’s kind of locked
and loaded and ready to go. I want to be able to do the preliminary things way up front, and get the ideas of
where I want to go and then turn it over to the engineers to design to code and requirements. It follows the same
concept as building information modeling for buildings and even plant design, where you start with a bigger idea
that becomes a formula for what you want to build.

V1: Your next steps seem to embed more intelligence in the model. You shared your plans for a utility design
product, where business rules in terms of the right transformer or other infrastructure inform the design of a power
line or substation.

McRoberts: We have TopoBase that has been combined with Map 3D as one product to give us what something
is, where something is, how they are related, and at what point in time. We put the utility design product on top of
that, so now I can plan, manage and design in the same environment. It’s a BIM environment for utilities.
Civil 3D has Map 3D features at the core, such as coordinates. What we’re also doing is combining these into an
infrastructure design environment. The difference between the products are their different scales. I can be looking
at an entire states water piping system  in Map 3D, when I design I need a more detailed 10-mile view in Civil 3D.
The idea is that the larger Map 3D view is a planning view, with Civil 3D as a design view.

V1: Is the distinction between the products primarily focused on different scale?

McRoberts: We have approached this on the concept of scale and different levels of detail. I can’t give a
contractor the statewide view and tell them to design a highway. I have to get it down to the local level and given
them a 10-mile view of the stretch of highway that I want them to build. But I also have to look at in the context of
the large network system across the whole state that I need to manage. The level of scale dictates the level of
detail, with low detail at the large scale and high detail at the smaller scale.

V1: Is there a mechanism for the coordinated and centralized management of these details?

McRoberts: That’s where the asset management of TopoBase comes in. It allows you to look at the past to see
what things looked like five years ago, to view all the projects that are currently ongoing, and to plan into the
future.

I used to work at Commonwealth Gas in their gas systems, and my job as a systems analyst was to look at the
network lifecycle and balance that with demand. I might be looking at a 10-inch pipe and saying that it needs to be
upgraded to 12-inches, but it’s not  that easy, these things take time. The utility coordinates the work with
repaving schedules where they’ll be digging up the roads. Otherwise, the company has to pay for both the pipe
and a new road.

It gets complicated to coordinate all that work with every street with a pipe, and upgrades needing to happen
across a large network. It’s not a small problem.

V1: I can see that all the pieces and parts are there to do the design and view the whole network. With all these
different scales of views, is data storage and data management still an issue?

McRoberts: When I’m designing I’m looking at a lot of detail, but at the larger scale all I want to know is that it is a
12-inch pipe. In Civil 3D it is a physical pipe, with a lot of information. The information, and the way that I
represent the information is different at different scales.

As far as the capability to store the information, that comes down to the environment where we store it. We store
it in our Vault Collaboration System in terms of a project or via an embedded database in our planning
environment or we can take it up to the enterprise level with Oracle.

Storage issues are less of an issue because they depend on how you graphically view the information, and the
level of detail that you want to see about it.

V1: You used to be very centered on Oracle as the database piece, but with the latest release you have opened
up to a more database agnostic approach. I imagine that offers some new opportunities for users at the lower
end.

McRoberts: It also allows us to get on a single desktop. Small utility companies and small planning companies
can now have it on their desktop rather than saying that they have to have a database, a database administrator,
and everything else that goes along with that. It now just becomes part of the package, but you can extend it as
big and as broad as you want to. The idea here was to democratize the technology so that you didn’t need to be
in an enterprise environment to reap the same benefits of the products.
V1: Are you getting back to the digital cities concept?

McRoberts: Digital cities never left, but we’ve augmented it with something bigger. It’s all about infrastructure
planning, and we’re now focusing on both cities and rural environments to include urban planning and rural
development. We don’t want to get shoehorned into digital cities, although digital cities are a part of it.

Now we’ve expanded this environment to broader planning issues such as a new wind farm off the shore or a
long transmission line. When you start to look at transmission line planning, they aren’t insignificant projects
because they require hundreds of miles of planning and coordination to know when and where you’re going, and
how you are going to build it. Wind farms capacity are all around the Great Lakes in the United States right now
and we’re missing on the order of 40,000 linear miles of transmission lines in order to carry that clean power.

That all has to be planned, and it’s not about a city. You have to plan this at a much larger scale, you have to plan
it at a bigger scale but you also have to bring it down to a local scale in order to understand what the impact is.

V1: We saw a number of examples of your customers using the Galileo platform to visualize their projects in
context. Has the integration between products been a major part of this development work?

McRoberts: A lot of the graphics that we showed in Galileo came from Civil 3D and were of projects that were
already done. The detailed views were already designed, and they pushed it out to Galileo to show the customer
the project in a greater context and to see how it would be built. It was basically a full terrain model in Galileo with
the Civil 3D model imported and just a few hours of work to add more details. They then had a fully navigable
model.

The integration between products is simply about data flow. We’re moving data around between products at
different scales. The information piece for us is absolutely huge.

There were technology pieces in the LandXplorer acquisition that were extremely good, including the GIS data
extraction pieces, but the graphic engines within Autodesk are unmatched. We replaced a number of things with
best-in-class pieces of Autodesk, and then we augmented it with things like the ability to sketch, and our FDO
environment for moving data back and forth. We took the most essential parts and pieces.

V1: You mentioned the ability to communicate with clients and the public. Is the communication function a large
part of the Galileo product?

McRoberts: What you have is an environment that can be highly rendered or be cartoonish if we want it to be.
Depending on who you are talking to, or the phase of the project, you want to approach them differently. You can
get the public involved in a granular or a big level view.

We have heard for years from our customers about great projects that they couldn’t get moving because of public
outcry. When they brought the projects to the public it was often highly rendered even if it just illustrated early
concepts. When it’s that well rendered and almost photorealistic it come across as a definite plan rather than a
concept, and the public outcry beginsThe idea of being able to adjust the level of realism and fidelity of the
graphic, with a raw look of the information, is a big part of how one would communicate using Galileo.

Galileo can also be hosted in the cloud with Web viewers to share the information with the public. Because what
we do is so publicly geared, if I have a model I want to put that into a browser and have the public vote on it. They
can indicate the things they like and don’t like, with the idea of making those graphics dynamic so they can
navigate around.

V1: I like how you’ve simplified the model building, with the easy application of textures and building templates.
McRoberts: It’s really about opening things up, and not limiting the possibilities. I want to be able to drag and
drop how things look, putting in different facades. You can completely change the look of the city. It isn’t a huge
level of detail, but you can do it quickly to get the ideas out to the public and the client. When you have an
understanding of the base level of what they’re looking for, then you can take it to the next planning or design
level.
 
V1: Would the planning elements be something that a third-party would be involved in? I’m trying to understand
how that goes to market, because there’s so much of a service component and back-and-forth with public
outreach.

McRoberts: It’s been built to be extensible, so it’s a platform that can be extended in many ways. If I can put this
into a browser, it’s just a window. I can take it and build an entire website around it. I can use MapGuide as a
query engine into the model. I can create a survey to understand what clients and the public are interested in. The
browser viewing window can be embedded into just about any website.

V1: Does this new level of integration finally get us into the digital age of 3D city planning?

McRoberts: Boston still has a large room with a balsa model, and every time you want to build a building you
have to come in and put your little model in the larger model. It’s a little bit easier to digitally view the larger
building in a digital context to navigate around it, and even show what the city looks like looking out from the
inside of your building. It seems that this is a better approach. There’s a time and a place for everything.

V1: On the infrastructure planning side, is there a strong call there as well for this larger scale viewing
environment?

McRoberts: If I can plan better, I can better educate and communicate design intent to get past the public, past
the city councils, past the planning board, and with richer and better information I can get my projects accelerated.
We want to put your GIS data to work. It’s our ability to take GIS and other data, aggregate all the file formats,
and pull them into an environment to plan better that is our strength.

A 10-year project in the highway industry isn’t a long project. There’s seven years of planning, three years of
design, and one year of construction. The planning time involves environmental, public awareness, and other
details. Typically the outreach has been two-dimensional drawings and photos showing where we are, and where
we might be. It’s not a well-articulated view for those that don’t work in the infrastructure planning industry.

Rather than highly detailed plans from the start, you can just as easily start in more of a sketching environment,
bringing in the individual pieces of what exists now, and then bring it into design when you’re ready to complete
the design. When you show people the design in context, including details like traffic analysis to show improved
commute times, it’s really powerful. You can tell people these details all day long, but when you show them in a
model it becomes real. You can’t do that with lines, arcs and polygons.