Autodesk University 2009: AEC Keynote and Design Computation Symposium

In AECbytes Newsletter #42 published last week, I presented the highlights of the general session keynote that was held on the opening day of  Autodesk University 2009 earlier this month, which included presentations by Autodesk CEO Carl Bass, CTO Jeff Kowalski, and guest speakers Jon Landau from Lightstorm Entertainment and  Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute. As we saw, a lot of interesting ideas and concepts about technology were presented including optimization, computational problem-solving, and cloud computing, but it was not clear if these were being translated into actual products that professionals could use, leading me to conclude in my analysis that the keynote was high on ideas but short on specifics. In this article, we will look at the AEC industry keynote and explore if that yielded any insights about future product direction and capabilities that building professionals could look forward to. We will also look at the highlights of the Design Computation Symposium held a day before the main event, which was focused on the use of optimization and generative tools to explore and inform design solutions.

Highlights from the Plant and Infrastructure Divisions

Autodesk’s AEC division, which had seen the addition of civil, transportation, and geospatial solutions earlier this year (see the article on Autodesk’s 2010 product portfolio launch), has been further expanded to include its utilities and plant solutions as well. Thus the AEC industry keynote had a broad spectrum of varied disciplinary professionals to address, and while it was interesting to learn about the application of Autodesk technologies in each of these disciplines—showcased also by an actual customer—it also meant that none of the disciplines could be addressed in much depth as the individual presentations were forced to be very brief.

For the plant industry, Autodesk has recently released a new application, AutoCAD Plant 3D, after 5 years in development, enabling it to compete more effectively with leading plant solution providers such as Bentley, Intergraph, and Aveva. Plant customers are also making extensive use of Navisworks, showing that this turned out to be a very smart acquisition for Autodesk, going way beyond the building industry alone. The customer showcased for Autodesk’s plant solutions was Statoil from the Netherlands, which is also using AutoCAD P&ID in addition to its other plant solutions. The example from the utilities industry, which uses the same solutions as the plant industry, was Parsons Corporation, who talked about their work on an advanced water treatment project at DeKalb County, Georgia, for which they also made use of AutoCAD MEP.

For the infrastructure division—which includes civil, transportation, and geospatial solutions—the vision is to extend the concept of BIM to infrastructure design as well, expanding the use of the model-based approach beyond buildings to their surrounding context. Thus, civil engineering professionals were being urged to adopt BIM and reap the benefits of it that building design professional were already realizing.  The customer showcased here was the same engineering firm, Parsons Brinckerhoff, whose work on the Presidio Parkway reconstruction project in San Francisco was briefly presented during the general session. In the AEC keynote, we had the opportunity to learn a little more about the project. It is a $1 billion reconstruction project of the Doyle Drive highway that runs through the historic Presidio district and provides access to the Golden Gate Bridge (see Figure 1) The highway has reached the end of its operational life and is structurally deficient. The reconstruction is a five year project, comprising eight different construction contracts, with a lot of stakeholders. A key criterion for the redesign was that traffic had to remain unaffected during construction, as it is a key commuter and scenic route through the city of San Francisco. Parsons Brinckerhoff developed seven schematic models exploring different design alternatives and used a wide variety of tools, including Civil 3D for 3D parametric models of roads, Bentley’s MicroStation for the structural design, Navisworks for coordination, and laser scanning to capture existing conditions. The use of the model-based approach enabled model-based estimating and scheduling, evaluation of various construction sequences to determine the optimal ones, and the creation of accurate and realistic simulations of traffic patterns that were able to demonstrate how the design would actually work if it was built.

The Focus of the Building Division: Renovation and Sustainability

For the building division at Autodesk, the current focus is on supporting the two main trends in the building industry that are emerging: retrofits and sustainability. With the economic downturn, the industry is seeing a shift from building new construction to retrofitting and renovating existing buildings, and nowhere is this trend more clearly exemplified than by the GSA, which is the country’s largest building owner and landlord. It was hardly surprising, then, to find that the GSA was one of the representative customers showcased at the AEC keynote for the building division. The project profiled was the National Building Museum in Washington DC (see Figure 2), undertaken as a research study by Autodesk with the help of the architectural firm, BNIM. Using laser scanning technology that creates 3D models from point clouds, a 3D geometric model of the building was generated which was used as the basis for creating a Revit model. The conversion process took about a week. Once a BIM model was available, it was used with energy analysis tools to run performance simulations, allowing recommendations to be made to the GSA on how to improve its energy performance. The GSA has recently awarded several multi-million dollar laser scanning contracts, indicating that renovation of its existing building portfolio is now becoming the main focus of the agency.

The other building project that was profiled in the AEC keynote was the Tuttle Courthouse Annex in Atlanta, which is also a GSA building. The project included the renovation of four historic buildings totally 100,000-square-foot, along with an expansion of administrative offices, LEED Silver certification, and the design of a new, two-level addition. The Beck Group was chosen as the Design-Build firm for the project. The GSA mandated the use of BIM, and the Beck Group, in turn, mandated BIM use among its consultants. Beck is also known for its development of DProfiler, which it calls a “macro-BIM” solution (see its review in AECbytes), but it did not seem as if this application was used on the Tuttle project. Instead, all the three disciplinary Revit applications were used (see Figure 3), along with Navisworks for review and coordination, and Constructware for collaboration and project management. The project team also used laser scanning to build an accurate model of as-built conditions and used that as the basis for the planned improvements. In portions of the largest building, the designers had to replace much of the existing wooden structure with steel, an extremely complex process involving lowering the basement floor elevations and installing new columns, footings, and foundations on a large segment of the building. The modeling proved to be critical to understanding, coordinating, and visualizing this work, not just for the designers, but also for the contractors. Throughout the design phase, the Beck Group was also able to link the models into its cost-estimating software, enabling them to provide accurate and updated estimates of the project at every stage.

There was no mention of how exactly the sustainability target for the Tuttle Courthouse building was being achieved and what software was used for this purpose. And while the GSA did disclose that the new energy mandate required it to reduce its energy use by 50% and become carbon neutral in 30 years, it was not clear how Autodesk was innovating in the area of energy analysis to enable clients like the GSA meet its sustainability goals. A demonstration towards the end of the AEC keynote showed improved energy analysis capabilities in Revit with a dashboard providing real-time feedback for rapid energy modeling, but nothing conclusive was said about when exactly this would be available, suggesting that the demo could have been a mock-up rather than a working prototype.

Design Computation Symposium

This Symposium was put together at Autodesk University by Dr. Robert Aish, who had earlier been with Bentley where he had spearheaded the development of the GenerativeComponents application. It was similar to the event that Aish used to put together at Bentley’s annual BE conferences (for example, see AECbytes Newsletter #9 on Bentley’s 2004 BE conference), where presenters included academic researchers as well as design practitioners working on new technological ideas. The Symposium at Autodesk University was focused on the topic of design computation, which, as we have seen, has been a recurring theme at Autodesk University, both last year as well as this year. But while the keynotes were short on specifics, the Symposium allowed attendees to learn a little more about what design computation could actually entail in terms of tools and technologies, including those that are available and being used now, as well as those still being researched and developed.

AEC-specific projects and examples that were presented at the Symposium included the use of structural optimization, based not only on member sizes but also around parameters such as stiffness, volume, deflection, and vibration, allowing engineers to design highly optimized structures for engineering driven projects such as bridges. Another example of optimization presented was the design of the inclined glass curtain walls for the Vancouver Convention Center Expansion Project, which was analyzed using finite element analysis and optimized to minimize deflection from self-weight and wind gusts. We learned about how SOM uses structural optimization tools and methods such as Michell frames, principal stress trajectories, genetic algorithms, and selective distribution of material in a structure for its trademark skyscraper projects, using the optimization itself as a generator of building form and aesthetics. We also learnt more about the Centre Pompidou-Metz project in France that was briefly shown in the general session keynote, which demonstrated how buildings with complex forms could be built almost as easily and at a cost similar to standard forms by using parametric 3D models and optimization during pre-fabrication that takes into account factors such as transport, assembly, elimination of waste, structure, constructability, etc.

Autodesk also used this opportunity to share some of the research work it is doing. I was pleasantly surprised to learn that there was a dedicated group within the company called Autodesk Research that was focused on exploring and solving some of the critical problems in the different industries that Autodesk solutions address. This group is distinct from Autodesk Labs, which I looked at in depth in an article in January 2008. In addition to Robert Aish, the Autodesk Research group includes several researchers, many with Ph.D.s, and they collaborate with other researchers at universities around the world. The main focus areas of the group currently include human-computer interaction, computer graphics, digital ergonomics, and design simulations. A complete list of projects can be seen at http://www.autodeskresearch.com/projects.html. For example, the “Learning” project aims to investigate advanced techniques for assisting users in learning complicated applications. It is looking at features such as supercharged tooltips that show video clips of tools in action instead of just static images and text. Hopefully, some of this research will soon find its way into applications such as Revit and provide a badly needed boost to the quality of its documentation (see my review of Revit Architecture 2010). Another example is the “Digital 210 King” project, which is focused on an environmental simulation of an existing building with the objective of validating existing simulation tools. Another interesting project, relevant to both manufacturing and AEC, is “Digital Ergonomics,” which is attempting to develop an accurate representation of a human that can allow design prototypes and ergonomics to be tested against known human factors needs and refined through simulation. 

Analysis and Conclusions

I found that the AEC industry keynote at this year’s Autodesk University had the same issues that I pointed out for the general session keynote: it lacked depth and substance. The consolidation of more and more divisions into AEC may have been prompted by operational and financial considerations at Autodesk, but it seems that the reorganization runs the risk of spreading the AEC division too thin, of diminishing its focus and attention on the individual industries it serves. At least, that’s the impression that seemed to come across at the AEC keynote. The brief, scripted presentations for each of the plant, utilities, infrastructure, and building divisions merely skimmed the surface of Autodesk’s offerings for these industries and provided little insight into future product plans, direction, strategies, and so on, which is something you expect to hear a lot more about at a vendor’s user conference. I hope that going forward, Autodesk will revert to having separate keynotes for the individual industries, where it can talk in more detail about the issues and challenges that each industry is facing and what Autodesk is working on to address them.

From the perspective of a building industry professional, it was certainly interesting to hear about the growing trend towards renovation in addition to sustainability, which has been on the radar screen for quite some time now. I hope this means that Autodesk will focus on developing better capabilities to work with laser scanned data in its applications. In particular, speeding up the conversion of geometric models created from point clouds to BIM models would be tremendously useful, and it should be a good technological challenge for Autodesk to try and tackle. Perhaps Autodesk Research could focus some of its resources on this problem. I am also looking forward to seeing some actual energy analysis improvements in the next release of Revit after so much talk about optimization and real-time analysis feedback to drive sustainable design. Autodesk did not mention other key challenges such as the ability for large distributed teams to work together on the same model, but I hope that the competitive pressure from ArchiCAD—which addressed this problem in its latest release with a model-based server, described in my recent review—is prompting it to come with its own solutions, which Revit users can benefit from soon. I also look forward to seeing some of the promising ideas that are being explored in the Autodesk Research group eventually make it to their commercial applications.

Stay tuned for a look at the third-party software and hardware products working with Autodesk applications that were exhibited at Autodesk University, to be published next month.

About the Author

Lachmi Khemlani is founder and editor of AECbytes. She has a Ph.D. in Architecture from UC Berkeley, specializing in intelligent building modeling, and consults and writes on AEC technology. She can be reached at lachmi@aecbytes.com.

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