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Geo whiz: Bentley to acquire Cesium
We explore the surprise deal that promises to bring the worlds of digital twins and geospatial closer together

Graphisoft in the era of AI
How does the developer of Archicad plan to put AI to work on behalf of its customers?

AI is hard (to do well)
Generative AI (GenAI) is extremely promising, but achieving tangible results is more complex than the hype suggests

Darwinism in AEC technology
To adapt and survive, the AEC industry should be focusing on knowledge-based expert design systems

Pricing, licensing and business models
The rapid evolution in the way AEC software companies charge for licences and shepherd their users to boost revenue

Graphisoft strategy
In the shift from BIM to BIM 2.0, big changes are underway at Graphisoft

Snaptrude advances
The cloud-based BIM 2.0 software fleshes out its features in pursuit of victory over the current desktop BIM tools

Vectorworks futures
CEO Biplab Sarkar talks new features, moving from file to cloud databases, auto-drawings AR, openness in BIM and AI

The investment issue
With Autodesk dealing with an activist investor problem what could be the knock-on effect for customers?

Autodesk Content Catalog
Autodesk has integrated Unifi’s solution for managing and accessing design content into its cloud stack

How to choose a remoting protocol
Advice for delivering performative remote workstation deployments

The post AEC Magazine Sept / Oct 2024 Edition appeared first on AEC Magazine.

It’s rare that a piece of industry news arrives in my inbox and prompts me to do a double-take. But that’s exactly what happened on 6 September, with the news that Bentley Systems had acquired Cesium.

Bentley Systems is the infrastructure giant in the AECO space and is currently undergoing a changing of the guard as the brothers who founded the company take a step back and get a new executive team installed.

That can be a distracting process for any organisation. However, new Bentley CEO Nicholas Cumins has made the choice to forge ahead with an industry significant acquisition, probably the most impactful since Google sold SketchUp to Trimble.

Because Bentley has always strongly focused on infrastructure, geospatial has played an important part in the data frameworks that its solutions provide. Decades ago, the company was the first CAD software firm to integrate a world-based coordinate system in its file format, because big infrastructure projects are always located somewhere and can span thousands of kilometres.

Bentley has had agreements with Esri, in addition to offering its own mapping and cadastre-driven tools. However, for the last few years, it has obsessively developed and also acquired technologies relating to 4D construction, reality capture, digital twin and asset management.

Bentley Systems is not the only AEC-focused software firm to understand the importance of geospatial. When Andrew Anagnost took the CEO job at Autodesk in 2017, he didn’t waste time in forging a partnership with ESRI and starting to back-fill the company’s BIM and civils products with GIS integration. Autodesk also actively chased Bentley Systems’ Department of Transport clients and acquired Innovyze in 2021 to expand into water treatment, another Bentley dominated market. For over five years, Esri and Autodesk have been developing hooks between their products, enabling the movement of BIM and GIS within their ecosystems.

Find this article plus many more in the Sept / Oct 2024 Edition of AEC Magazine

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Enter Cesium

So where does Cesium fit into all this? For many reasons, the company hasn’t previously seemed like an acquisition option. In much the same vein as Robert McNeel and Rhino, Cesium built a business based on community and established a huge network of around one million users, as well as about 10,000 developers, with powerful yet relatively low-cost GIS integration/distribution tools.

Cesium has a deep belief in the open source approach to software, putting a lot of effort into the development of Cesium. JS and its streamable, interactive 3D Tile open format, which supports vector, 4D, 2D, 3D, point clouds and photogrammetry. This is free for both commercial and non-commercial use and has been used to map subsurface, surface, airborne and space environments.

Cesium’s formats have been embraced by the likes of Google and NASA. Its data structures, meanwhile, also support other open formats, such as glTF for model info (asset information), as well as the latest advances in GPU acceleration. While the technology is a perfect fit for Bentley’s digital twin strategy, the culture fit was, on the face of it, incongruous to corporate customers.

Around the time of the 2020 Open Letter to Autodesk, I had a conversation with Keith Bentley, then Bentley Systems CTO, in which we discussed whether open source applications such as Blender BIM were the way to go. From that chat, I was left in little doubt that this was not Keith Bentley’s mindset, since he was strongly of the belief that programmers’ efforts should be rewarded.

However, he was more inclined to agree that open source data was perhaps a way forward, because for customers, the keys to data must remain in their hands. The whole premise of digital twins requires the assembling of data from all sorts of applications, in many file formats. In that respect, data trapped in proprietary silos is likely to be an industry-wide problem. In 2021, Bentley opened the iTwin.js library with source code hosted on GitHub and distributed under the MIT licence. Since then, Bentley has been seeking wider adoption of its iTwin data wrapper.

So, while I was pondering Cesium’s culture fit, I hadn’t considered Bentley’s cultural change. Its newfound belief in open data isn’t just a passing fad. It really is something that the company intends to deliver on.

When considered from that angle, acquiring Cesium takes Bentley closer to its goal of having open format technology that covers all the many different sources of data necessary to build an infrastructure digital twin. That could be scan / photogrammetry data, BIM data, GIS data, asset tagging and management data.

Of course, Cesium offers far more besides. Its super-fast 3D pipeline enables huge datasets to be visualised locally in Unreal Engine, on the web, on a mobile and in real time. The Cesium ecosystem also includes developers who may want to utilise Bentley’s wide array of SaaS analytical and simulation tools or BIM capabilities, and existing customers will be able to view their digital twins in geospatial context for analysis and service planning.

In conversation

In conversation with Cesium CEO Patrick Cozzi, he outlined for me his view of the deal. “Cesium is an open-source project doing massive scale 3D geospatial, open source, open standards, large models with semantics on the web. When Bentley found Cesium eight or nine years ago, they opened up our eyes. They said, ‘Hey, Patrick, this is more than geospatial. This can do the built environment. This can do infrastructure,” he said.

He continued: “When we brought 3D Tiles to OGC (The Open Geospatial Consortium) to make an OGC community standard, Bentley was part of that original submission team. This is going back to 2017. Bentley had ContextCapture, now called iTwin Capture, which was some of the first photogrammetry ever put into Cesium. We have had a long relationship with Bentley. We’ve known the Bentley brothers, the leadership team of today, and we think we share a lot of the same DNA. We like Bentley’s interest and commitment and authenticity around open source, open standards, and building a platform which uplifts the ecosystem. We know that that is Bentley’s belief and it’s where Bentley wants to take the future.”

We are transitioning from files to a data centric world, and customers need to have confidence and trust in how the data is going to be handled. We believe in a true open approach, which is based on open standards, open source and open APIs Julien Moutte, Bentley Systems CTO

A few days prior to announcing the acquisition, Cesium published a press release regarding its BIM integration technology preview. At that time, AEC Magazine reached out to the company, but they couldn’t answer, because they were busy finalising the deal. Cozzi added, “As you saw just before the agreement, we are doing more in AEC.’” I suspect that Bentley has a raft of technology to assist in that.

Bentley CTO Julien Moutte then gave me the Bentley perspective, “We are transitioning from files to a data centric world, and customers need to have confidence and trust in how the data is going to be handled. We believe in a true open approach, which is based on open standards, open source and open APIs,” he said.

“The iTwin technology stack is going to continue using more and more open standards. We are looking at creating and enriching the standard ecosystem with some new capabilities around BIM collaboration. We have discussed the limitations we’ve seen in IFC, for instance, and we’ve created BI-model technology, and I think one thing we captured in the room at NXT BLD is that not many know about (Bentley) iModels,” he continued.

“We need to learn how to be better in creating an ecosystem, a community. And I think that’s one of the things that Patrick and his team are going to bring to us. We want to create a thriving developer ecosystem on top of this platform, which is built around open data.”

Cesium has about 60 employees based in Philadelphia. They are mainly programmers, with about 10 people in sales – but sales are mainly inbound and focused on products such as its Cesium Ion SaaS 3D geospatial data hubs, together with large partnerships and hosting. The Cesium offices are located not too far from the Bentley Exton Headquarters. By joining forces with Bentley, Cozzi said that it will allow the company to achieve more industry impact.

Moutte also explained what he thinks Cesium brings to Bentley tech stack. “There are multiple facets here. Obviously, I believe that our users, the engineers of the world, would benefit greatly in having more context when they do their work, and we believe that the best way to provide this to them is by leveraging the Cesium technology.

“Today, we’re trying to do this with the iTwin platform, but I think there is a better way to do this when it comes to geospatial data, bringing in Google 3D Tiles, making sure that we can combine and bring all of that data in an environment in an aligned way, using the geospatial coordinates. Whether it’s underground, buildings or engineering models, it’s about more value to our users,” he said.

He concluded: “The huge Cesium ecosystem is consuming Cesium geospatial data. If they are bringing building models in, they don’t have the full detail of what those building models contain. It’s mostly geometry. There’s a lot of value we could deliver by providing access to the metadata of those building models. We have capabilities to bring in geospatial analysis, lots of simulation, whether it’s flooding, mobility, structures and visualising all of this in the context of geospatial is also very valuable. It’s a massive opportunity.”

Cozzi added, “BIM could learn a lot from these large GIS models. 3D Tiles doesn’t just stream the geometry and metadata for terrain and photogrammetry, but can also do that for the built environment. Up to this point, a lot of that has been done in OBJ files or FBX, which are standard graphics files. We thought we could help them more, so have built some new pipelines to preserve more of that semantic data, especially the hierarchical nature.”

So, for example, Cesium built a pipeline for IFC, and also into Revit, he explains. “Then we run our super-smart algorithms on the geometry and metadata, and frankly, the metadata might actually be heavier than the geometry. Then, in a domain-specific way, we slice and dice that into 3D Tiles, so that it’s streamed very effectively over the web, placed within a geospatial context,” he said.

“So where do we go next? Bentley brings a ton of domain knowledge about infrastructure and AEC, and we keep saying ‘better together’.”

Conclusion

Cozzi will now head up the iTwin platform developed within Bentley. While the technology benefit has been clearly explained, it also seems that Bentley hopes to preserve and learn from the open-source culture that Cesium has embodied, with its dedication to openness, performance and solving problems for thousands of users in many different industries.

While I still have my doubts about the potential size of market for digital twins within the building sector – insofar as there are so many buildings but the cost of making a twin is high – when you scale up the geo level and start talking about managing assets like roads, rail, national grids and power stations, then digital twins and asset management start to make a lot more sense.

The acquisition of Cesium is a major coup for Bentley, which will not only help it in its historic markets, but also introduce it (literally) to a whole new digital world

The post Geo whiz: Bentley acquires Cesium appeared first on AEC Magazine.

Bentley Systems wasn’t wasting time at its recent YII conference, hammering home its ‘open’ approach to data. The message from Bentley’s execs was clear: the company is putting its weight behind openness— the sub text being that some of its competitors are not.

The emphasis was hard to miss. In the first two keynote presentations alone, led by new CEO Nicolas Cumins and CTO Julien Moutte, the word ‘open’ was used a staggering 60 times.

While AI also got a strong showing with 47 mentions, it was obvious that Bentley was speaking to customers, and not trying to impress investors. The message? Openness isn’t just a token word; it’s a cornerstone of Bentley’s strategy. “Your data is your data always,” said Cumins.

Moutte outlined the three pillars of Bentley’s open approach: open standards where everybody that was granted access to the data can read and understand it; open source, where every developer can leverage that data; and open APIs, where users are free to take their data out whenever they want, instead of just being able to query it.

Cumins also touched on the complexity of infrastructure projects, which involve multiple organisations, teams, and disciplines “This complexity makes it impossible for you to rely on any single system or single vendor. Instead, you need an ecosystem that enables flexibility, integration and interoperability across different tools and platforms,” he said.

He also addressed a common concern among customers: “Don’t get locked in,” he said. “Make sure you retain control of your data.”

As AEC firms navigate the transition from files to a data-lake world, this message should resonate more than ever. With proprietary files (DWG / DGN / RVT) at least drawings and models could be accessed via Open Design Alliance (ODA) libraries. With proprietary databases, access is granted only via APIs, which are under the control of the vendor.

“We are not creating another silo,” said Cumins.

Looking ahead, Bentley is focused not just on the present, but on the long-term future. Infrastructure is built to last. “Our users must assure that this data, their data, remains accessible for decades to come, and we believe this is only possible with a truly open approach,” said Moutte.

At the heart of Bentley’s open strategy is the iTwin platform, a suite of APIs and services designed to help AECO firms develop digital twin applications for designing, building, and operating infrastructure assets. iTwin integrates data from various sources—specs, drawings, CAD and BIM models, reality captures, sensor data, inspection records, and more.

The platform is built on a schema specifically designed for infrastructure. While the majority of this schema is open-source, one component — the Parasolid geometry modelling kernel —is proprietary, as it is owned by Siemens.

As Cumins explained, “The schema goes beyond basic data exchange, ensuring that data isn’t just accessible, but its meaning can also be understood, whether you’re dealing with materials or structures or subsurface data.”

He emphasised that this schema helps engineers, constructors, and organisations maximise the value of their data. “We’re not keeping it to ourselves. We actively encourage others in the industry to adopt the schema. This is about moving the entire infrastructure sector forward together.”

Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Cumins described AI as a “paradigm shift” for the infrastructure sector, highlighting the massive scale of data generated during the design, construction, and operational phases. “It makes infrastructure a prime area where AI can have the greatest impact,” he said.

Bentley’s investment in AI dates back several years. In 2018, the company acquired machine learning and IoT developer AIworx, which former CTO Keith Bentley described as an “acqui-hire,” meaning it was made primarily for the talent. Since then, that talent has driven several successful AI use cases, primarily in asset operations. These include automatic object classification in reality meshes and using computer vision, IoT sensors, and machine learning for predictive maintenance—detecting issues before they lead to failures.

Many of these technologies now fall under Bentley Asset Analytics, a new product line that uses AI to provide insights into the condition of infrastructure assets. “This approach is especially important for critical infrastructure like bridges and dams, where monitoring and maintenance are key to ensuring long-term safety and performance,” said Mike Campbell, Chief Product Officer, Bentley Systems.

The portfolio includes Blyncsy, which utilises crowd-sourced dashcam footage and machine learning models to automate roadway maintenance and asset inventory. “AI can help identify roadside assets and assess their conditions, everything from a broken stop sign to a faulty streetlight to a fresh pothole,” explained Mike Schellhase, VP of asset analytics at Bentley. “These insights feed directly into the infrastructure digital twin, the iTwin, and are presented in iTwin Experience to show the latest conditions and context.”

Another product, OpenTower iQ, uses drone imagery, data, and AI to manage telecom towers throughout their lifecycle, handling everything from data acquisition and visualisation to structural analysis, site design, and maintenance.

Bentley plans to expand these solutions to cover a broader range of asset types, offering owner-operators increasingly advanced AI-powered tools.

Now, the company is pushing AI further into the design phase, using generative AI to automate repetitive tasks.

The first of a new generation of AI-powered design tools is OpenSite+, which is used for civil site design (including roadways, parking lots, and buildings).

The software features a co-pilot experience that taps into knowledge stored in documentation, specifications, and 3D site models through natural language interactions. “We can ask questions like, ‘Can I build a hotel in this area?’ or ‘Do I have enough parking to meet my requirements?’” said Francois Valois, VP of civil infrastructure at Bentley.

“At this stage [in the design process], we don’t know if our layout is optimal, so we build a neural network that evaluates thousands of alternatives to find the best one, optimising costs while meeting engineering requirements,” Valois explained. The software also offers AI-powered earthwork optimisation, which Bentley has enhanced by wrapping its current engine in a neural network to make the process significantly faster.

Another key feature is automated drawing production, a hot topic in AEC as it can save so much time and money (read this AEC Magazine article). According to Bentley, drawing production can account for up to 50% of a site design project’s time, and Bentley’s AI-powered tools automate annotation, labelling, and sheeting, optimising the placement of labels and dimensions, and according to organisational standards.

Currently, drawing production isn’t built directly into OpenSite+, but rather, it’s routed through OpenSite Designer, an existing power-platform based product based on MicroStation. However, as Campbell explained by going down this route, the technology can then be made available in other power platform-based applications. Watch this space.

This process will take time, as the large language model (which Campbell playfully wants to call a “large drawing model”) has so far only been trained on tens of thousands of site plans and only from North America. “We’ve got to do that for the UK, for Australia, for all of the other places, because the standards are all different,” Campbell said. “Roadway plans have a different look and feel, right? So, we’ve got to build a model for that.”

As to where the training data has come from, Campbell explained that most of it is sourced from a licensed open-source library, though some customers have granted Bentley explicit permission to use their data. “We’re not just going and taking plans from random [customer] accounts,” he said, adding that Bentley keeps track of the provenance of every data set used. If a company decides to withdraw its data, Bentley will retrain the model accordingly.

In the future, customers will be able to train the AI model on their own data. “Say you’ve got 6,000 site plans—you can put them into your own local, retrained version of the model, and that will be yours and yours alone.”

As for the future of AI at Bentley, Campbell hinted at broader applications. “Instead of using AI to generate a site, could we use AI to generate other designs, a bridge design, for example, optimise a road for – not just the obvious ones like curvature and safety, but things like carbon impact and cost and time.”

“Civil engineers can imagine a certain section of the design space. AI can imagine a much broader design space,” Campbell added. “The good news is that in engineering, we’re governed by rules of physics and standards and safety factors and all those kinds of things, so that limits it, but still, it’s bigger than what a typical engineer can think about.”

Desktop deployment

Beyond AI, one of the most significant aspects of OpenSite+ is that it’s a completely new type of application. It’s iTwin-native, so it writes directly to an iModel without needing to go through intermediary formats like DGN. Unlike many modern applications, it’s also a desktop application, rather than running in a browser.

“We’re not yet convinced that all of these engineering workloads are going to be able to work on the cloud,” explained Campbell. “We also want to be able to take advantage of local compute. And we’ve also got our eye on these new AI processors that are coming out – NPUs – and we want to be able to take advantage of that.”

OpenSite+ works both online and offline, syncing changes (deltas) when connectivity is restored. Bentley is taking the same desktop/iTwin-native approach with its new visualisation tool, Advanced Visualization, which is built on Unreal Engine (more on this later).

Campbell acknowledges that more tools are in the pipeline, either going through validation or still in the research phase, and they will all follow this same framework.

With many new AEC software tools from startups running in the browser, we asked Campbell if this would influence Bentley’s acquisition strategy. “Not necessarily, but it would be a consideration,” he said. “We certainly look at architecture [of the software].”

He also admitted that technical integration has become a key focus for Bentley, which is one reason why acquisitions have slowed over the last couple of years. The priority now is ensuring that products work seamlessly together. “The idea of convergence and integration, ensuring that data flows smoothly across applications and the lifecycle, and informs the infrastructure digital twin—that’s the goal,” Campbell emphasised.

Back into BIM?

Bentley once held a strong position in architecture, especially in the early 2000s with MicroStation and GenerativeComponents, a pioneering computational design tool that preceded Grasshopper.

However, in recent years, the company has shifted its focus away from this market. Given the growing interest in next-generation BIM tools, the question arises: does Bentley have aspirations to get back into BIM?

“Our focus right now is absolutely on horizontal infrastructure, and there’s plenty there to keep us busy,” said Campbell.

“But I’m reluctant to say never, especially in light of the sentiment of the broader AEC ecosystem. In particular, I’m thinking about open letters, I’m thinking about the AEC spec [AEC Future Software Specification]. I’m thinking about what their vision is for the tools they’ll use in the future. And I’m thinking about the tools that we’re building. And when I read that spec and I look at our strategy, it’s not dissimilar. It’s not a slam dunk, but we’re in the ballpark.

“The data lake, the elements of openness, design in context and at scale. That’s in the AEC spec.”

Geospatial – giving assets context

Last month, out of the blue, Bentley Systems acquired Cesium, developer of an industry cherished 3D geospatial platform – Cesium ion – with an ecosystem of open standards, including Cesium.JS and 3D Tile technology. (To learn more about the acquisition read this AEC Magazine article).

“With the acquisition of Cesium, we are now able to provide a 3D geospatial view of infrastructure,” said Cumins. “We are effectively changing the vantage point of an infrastructure digital twin, from the engineering model of the infrastructure asset to the planet Earth, upon which we geolocate the engineering model and all the necessary data from the surrounding built and natural environments.”

However, as Cumins explained, perhaps the most significant aspect of the acquisition is that Cesium as a company, perfectly aligns with Bentley’s vision of open standards and interoperability.

“The combination of Cesium plus iTwin enables developers to seamlessly align 3D geospatial data with engineering, subsurface, IoT, reality, and enterprise data to create digital twins with astonishing user experiences that scale from vast infrastructure networks to the millimetre-accurate details of individual assets—viewed from land, sky, and sea, from outer space to deep below the Earth’s surface to support engineering workflows.”

Cesium’s 3D Tile technology makes light work of huge geospatial datasets by streaming only what the user needs for any given view.

It uses a concept called hierarchical level of detail (HLOD), where you basically have a tree of tiles – the root being the least detailed version, the branches adding more detail, and the leaves having the highest resolution.

3D Tiles can handle a whole smorgasbord of 3D geospatial data including point clouds, reality models (derived from photogrammetry), and 3D buildings. Through its recent AECO Tech Preview Program it can also handle BIM models (IFC and Autodesk Revit), complete with metadata which can be used for querying, filtering, styling, and analytics.

The long-term plan is to unite the iTwin and Cesium Ion platforms, but as Patrick Cozzi, CEO of Cesium and now chief platform officer at Bentley, explained nothing will be done without input from the community. The potential is limitless, he said. “We can add voxels for biometric visualisation, for subsurface, we can add Gaussian splats for higher visual quality for point clouds; we can do temporal tiles to help show the change in construction sites over time.”

Building on this geospatial focus, Bentley announced a new strategic partnership with Google which will integrate Google’s comprehensive repository of 3D geospatial data with Cesium and Bentley’s iTwin platform.

“Consider a large urban development project where multiple infrastructure systems are used – roads, bridges, energy and water networks – that must be coordinated across various stakeholders,” said Cumins. “By integrating Google’s vast 3D geospatial data with Bentley Cesium technology and iTwin platform stakeholders can visualise their assets, both existing and plan in full real-world context.”

Advanced Visualization

Cesium 3D Tiles and Google 3D Tiles play a key role in Advanced Visualization, a new product from Bentley powered by Unreal Engine, designed to overcome the challenges of creating immersive, interactive, and photorealistic infrastructure experiences.

This software integrates seamlessly with iTwin for live access to up-to-date project data, enabling users to navigate massive models in real time using Cesium 3D Tiles.

As Greg Demchak, VP, emerging technologies group at Bentley explained, users can enrich their scenes with additional context and content: “Context in the form of Google 3D tiles, and content in the form of easy to place trees, cars, scale, figures and equipment.”

Advanced Visualization functions either as an out-of-the-box solution or as a flexible platform for building custom applications and is currently in Early Access.

Up front carbon analysis

One of the key challenges in achieving sustainability on infrastructure projects is the time-consuming nature of carbon reporting, which is typically handled by specialists.

Kelvin Saldanha, associate director at WSP, elaborated: “Once you’re ready to measure carbon, it needs to go through a rigorous quantity take-off process, including design compilation and data cleansing, before that data can be used in third-party software.”

This process can cause significant delays. As Saldanha noted, “A lot of times that delay means that the design team doesn’t know what the carbon score is until the design is very mature, and you kind of miss the opportunity to reduce your carbon score.”

He emphasised that the best opportunity to make a meaningful impact on carbon reduction is in the early stages of a project’s design cycle.

WSP has been testing new carbon analysis capabilities in iTwin Experience through Bentley’s Early Access Program, which Saldanha said gives the design team much-needed transparency in the earlier phases of a project. “Continuous calculations during the design process allow for accurate carbon reports to be generated much earlier in the project lifecycle,” he added.

What truly sets Carbon Analysis apart, according to Saldanha, is the software’s visualisation capabilities. “Instead of sifting through spreadsheets and tables, designers can now exchange data directly with EC3, view heat maps, and interact with them to quickly identify where they’ve got carbon intensive features on their project, and then they can target those.”

Bentley’s new Carbon Analysis capabilities are available to iTwin Experience users at no additional cost, though a separate licence is required for carbon assessment calculators like EC3 or OneClickLCA.

Conclusion

While many AEC software companies talk openness, few demonstrate the same level of commitment as Bentley – though open standards, open source and open APIs.

At YII, Bentley’s executives made this abundantly clear with deliberate, impactful messaging: “Don’t get locked in,” “Your data is your data,” and “We’re not creating another silo.”,

This was a strong signal to customers that the keys to their data must remain in their hands, a crucial point as the AEC industry transitions from file-based systems to data lake environments.

Of course, Bentley’s approach isn’t purely altruistic; as a company with shareholders now, it stands to benefit from the industry moving towards storing data in its model wrapper.

And while third parties can choose to use the open specification to create an iModel / iTwin independently, Bentley has a suite of mature data management, authoring and analysis tools and services ready to go.

But with this open approach it’s clear that Bentley is playing the long game—a smart strategy considering the long lifecycle of infrastructure assets.

Cumins pointed out that the software and platform used to manage these assets will evolve considerably over time. “So, by ensuring that our systems remain open, we allow organisations to adopt new technologies and innovations while still being able to access and build on their historical data,” he said.

Of course, it’s possible that future platforms may not even be developed by Bentley, but the key takeaway for customers investing in the Bentley iTwin ecosystem is this: they will always have the freedom to choose.

The post Bentley Systems: the promise of data freedom appeared first on AEC Magazine.

Cesium, a specialist in 3D geospatial technology, has launched its AECO Tech Preview Program, with the aim of improving workflow and capabilities that place architecture, engineering, construction, and operations (AECO) content in a 3D geospatial context.

The company has made two new technologies – Design Tiler and Revit Add-In – available for early access, to transform IFC and Revit files into 3D Tiles, an open standard developed by the Cesium team for streaming and rendering massive amounts of geospatial data.

AECO 3D Tiles includes metadata for querying, filtering, styling, and analytics, for efficiently streaming massive datasets to the web or through project-centred applications via Cesium’s geospatial platform.

According to Cesium’s Dave Braig, with IFC data as 3D Tiles, there is greater performance, increased interoperability, and less manual effort to optimise this rich content for viewing and distribution. 3D Tiles from Revit files include the metadata, materials, and textures.

Cesium has been testing these capabilities with AECO projects containing over 4 million individual objects and 800 million mesh triangles.

3D Tiles are compatible with Unreal Engine, via the Cesium for Unreal plugin, which allows developers to stream, visualize, and interact with large-scale geospatial datasets in real-time within the Unreal Engine environment.

3D Tiles are also compatible with Unity, Nvidia Omniverse, Bentley Systems iTwin platform, and other engines / platforms.

The post Cesium to connect AECO with 3D geospatial appeared first on AEC Magazine.

Building on their strategic alliance, Esri and Autodesk have integrated Esri ArcGIS Basemaps with Autodesk Civil 3D and AutoCAD to provide AEC professionals with ‘detailed geospatial data and mapping capabilities’. According to the companies, the new integrations are designed to further unify GIS and BIM, delivering ‘real business value’ to architects, engineers, planners, and contractors.

“Esri is proud to bring this new integration to Autodesk users, empowering them with enhanced visibility of existing conditions for better-informed design decisions that reduce environmental impacts,” said Kathleen Kewley, Esri director for AEC global business development.

“ArcGIS Basemaps serves as the cornerstone of our mapping products,” said Bridget Brown, geospatial and information management director for HDR, a user of Esri and Autodesk software.

“These carefully styled basemaps not only offer vital location context but also liberate our teams from creating them from the ground up, allowing us to concentrate on project-specific data.

“Additionally, the capability to customize these basemaps using the vector tile style editor empowers us to unlock new realms of cartographic creativity when needed.”

“ArcGIS Basemaps are the contextual canvas that establishes one of the most important elements when answering the question of ‘where’,” said Darin Welch, associate vice president, design, geospatial, and community intelligence, HNTB Digital Transformation Solutions, another Esri and Autodesk user.

“Esri’s basemaps have equipped our teams with immediate and accurate representation of the surrounding world, and the situational awareness necessary for making the best transportation decisions for improving our communities.”

The post ArcGIS Basemaps integrated into Civil 3D / AutoCAD appeared first on AEC Magazine.

London Gatwick has created a new geospatial platform using Esri’s GIS technology to support multiple operational areas at the airport, including engineering and environmental services.

The system helps make engineering and construction works safer by reducing accidental strikes on buried utilities and enabling better management of the airports biodiversity.

The geospatial platform contains critical infrastructure information spanning the 70-year history of the airport, including BIM, CAD, utilities, environmental, aerial photography and legacy data.

By integrating all spatial data into a single view, combined with advanced spatial analysis tools, mobile apps and dashboards, the Esri platform provides new insights to support better collaboration and decision-making across the airport.

The single view of buried assets including gas, electricity, telecoms, water and fuel, is proving critical in reducing accidental damage to utilities across the 1,600-acre site. Field engineers, third party contractors and major consulting firms all use the same single view of data, accessible on any device, when planning excavations.

With up to 50 engineering and construction projects on site at any one time, the new system is making work safer and reducing risk of disruption to airport operations from any unplanned outages.

London Gatwick is using the geospatial platform to support its Biodiversity Action Plan, designed to deliver a biodiversity net gain at the airport by 2030. Within the airport boundaries are 75 hectares of woodlands, grasslands and wetlands, inhabited by hundreds of species of mammals, birds, insects and bees.

Environmental data in the GIS includes environmental stewardship areas, notable birds, protected, rare or invasive alien species and bat box locations. The system also visualises the estimated embodied carbon of built assets.

Insights from the GIS allow London Gatwick to plan works around any environmentally sensitive sites to minimise impact and seek ways to bring additional benefits, such as improving biodiversity. The embodied carbon data allows users to see the carbon ‘price’ of assets, supporting sustainability decisions by showing the potential carbon emissions of demolitions or new construction.

“Being able to visualise and interrogate all spatial data from any discipline, on any device, is critical to the sustainable future of London Gatwick. Democratising spatial data in this way drives significantly more business and operational value from it,” explained Simon Richardson, Digital Information Lead, London Gatwick Airport.

“The new GIS supports our Master Plan, which includes delivering efficiencies through new technologies and process improvements, while bringing passenger service benefits and protecting the environment we operate in. It provides an immediate understanding of operational infrastructure, supporting faster and more informed decisions, which are integral to the running of the airport.”

Previously, London Gatwick used Autodesk’s Infrastructure Map Server to manage spatial data but looked for another GIS software vendor when the product became unsupported. “We selected GIS from Esri UK because its Managed Cloud Service made it more accessible at lower cost than an on-premise approach,” continued Richardson. “It also removes the burden of system management and updates, which saves a significant amount of time, allowing more resource to focus on strategic projects. The new system is quicker and easier to use and the benefits far outweigh the cost.”

Future plans include using the geospatial system as a planning tool for estate-wide works, including runway maintenance and repairs and making the data available to local planning authorities bordering the airport to help streamline their planning process.

The airport’s sustainability strategy is also set to benefit from the GIS, by helping to determine the optimal sites for solar panels, from potentially floating them in lakes or installing them on the most effective roof tops. London Gatwick’s ‘Decade of Change’ roadmap includes sourcing 50% of airport electricity from renewable sources with onsite generation part of the mix.

“Requests for new types of online maps are coming from across the business on a daily basis so the system is growing all the time. We expect the geospatial platform to grow significantly within the next 12 months,” said Richardson. “The Esri GIS has given us the foundation to create a digital twin. As a complex site with over 70 years of history, we are building a virtual representation of what has previously been built along with future plans, which helps manage the airport’s development.”

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Temple, a UK environment, planning and sustainability consultancy, has launched a new application to help AEC firms make decisions on development plans and meet the new biodiversity net gain (BNG) legislation.

The legislation, which came into force in February 2024, demands that all new construction projects deliver at least 110% of the biodiversity value found on a site prior to its development.

Temple, a recently appointed Esri UK silver partner, developed the UKHab and BNG Survey App using Esri’s GIS (Geographic Information System) technology. Designed to simplify the processes involved in BNG assessments, the software is said to streamline the workflow from field data collection to in-office assessment and provide a real time BNG score.

The app also enables the ‘seamless use’ of existing UKHab surveys and conversion to BNG surveys. According to Esri UK, this means many users can take advantage of their current ecological processes and comply with the new legislation faster and more cost effectively.

Additional functionality will soon include scenario modelling, to make the comparison of potential designs more accessible and financial differences more quantifiable. Future plans include applications aimed at specific sectors and their roles in BNG, including rural landowners, local government planning authorities and land developers.

“By combining our vast experience in ecology, environmental impact assessments and wider scientific understanding with established Esri tools, new digital workflows mean users can now manage a project’s impact on the landscape and comply with the new law in a highly accurate and efficient way,” said Mark Skelton, CEO at Temple.

Temple specialises in providing environment, ecology, planning and sustainability consultancy services on infrastructure projects across the UK. Customers include Network Rail, Transport for London, and the Government of Jersey.

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In the design software world, some tools are explicit, like BIM modellers, in that you get what you draw. Others do something akin to alchemy, aggregating disparate design and spatial information and delivering design insight.

Giraffe is very much in the latter camp. It’s founded on the core concept that connecting design (drawings/models) to mathematical analysis (numbers) at the earliest stage of a project is the single best way to create a mental model of a scheme, enabling designers and clients to create better cities.

CEO Rob Asher was previously design and R&D lead at one of Sydney’s most prestigious architecture firms, Cox Architecture. There, he took the lead on the practice’s use of modelling tools, Rhino, Grasshopper and design data. He explains his journey like this: “I started off doing very, very detailed architectural modelling. I love geometry. I love curves. I love ‘unique’. But in reality, a lot of what drives architectural projects is this kind of block and stack. And you need to get the fundamentals right. As Le Corbusier said, ‘Plan is the driver of form’,” he says.

That prompted a change in direction. “I moved into doing more block and stack buildings, corridor planning, master planning, urban planning, as a design discipline. I was having to use Grasshopper in conjunction with QGIS and there just weren’t the tools. It was just this real nightmare of fusing BIM and GIS.”

A Swiss army knife for decisions

Giraffe’s origins lie within the McNeel ecosystem of apps and Asher’s use of Grasshopper. That may well explain his use of an animal name for his company, taking its lead from McNeel’s use of Rhino, Grasshopper, Penguin and Flamingo.

But Giraffe quickly became its own, wholly contained application, based on generative design code. It’s essentially a ‘Swiss army knife’ for project, design and site decisions, aimed at a broad cross-section of disciplines: developers, architects, quantity surveyors, cost planners, government officials, to name but a few.

Says Asher: “Giraffe can go from literally nothing, just a map, to talking to a client about overshadowing, tenancy, floor plate, context and the financials in minutes.”

This cloud-based, real-time 3D application enables users to quickly and precisely draw massing, road networks, car park layouts, apartment floor plans or structural grids within a GIS context. It can simultaneously connect a wide number of geodatabases, both internal and external.

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While many conceptual modellers tend to be blocky, Giraffe features a range of generative design tools for modelling buildings that offer a lot more detail, including mullion, transoms, roof structures and so on, enabling rapid modelling in situ. It’s the kind of tool that can be put in front of a client for real-time modelling and decisions.

Giraffe is also a venue in which disparate project data can converge and then be analysed. Typically, that data might reside in Google Earth, Bluebeam, local zoning databases, Excel and SketchUp, among others — but Giraffe provides an antidote to this data fragmentation.

Because it is cloud-based, collaboration drives co-authoring, so users can work together. It also acts as a knowledge base, where firms can capture and retain past projects and distribute their IP or develop their own apps through API access.

Already, Giraffe has been deployed in hundreds of different projects, including feasibility studies, land use planning, brokerage listings, master planning, development tracking, location intelligence and public engagement. Users use it to build layers of relevant data: GIS info, site plans, 3D data, satellite data, solar information, conceptual cost data, wind, pollution, historical weather patterns.

The software provides analysis and dashboards with feedback on the metrics in which users are most interested. This can be shared with consultants, general contractors, planners and architects through an easy-to-use visual front-end and dashboard metrics.

Currently there are four levels of pricing for Giraffe. First, there is a free version, which allows users to create and share one project, providing them with a taste of the platform’s capabilities. The second tier up is called Core and is priced at $1,000 per user, per year. This includes unlimited projects, access to templates and libraries, marketplace access, a kanban board for agile project management, plus in-app support.

A third level, Portfolio is priced at $3,000 per user, per year and offers additional features such as workspace properties, unlimited kanbans, teams and member roles, API access and customer support. Finally, an Enterprise tier adds customer applications, SDK access, SSO and premium support.

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Esri and Autodesk have entered a new phase of their strategic alliance that aims to unify GIS and BIM, by agreeing to integrate ArcGIS Basemaps and ArcGIS Living Atlas of the World layers into Autodesk’s products.

“Partnering with Esri is intended to combine the power of BIM and GIS, which will enable our shared customers to build anything, anywhere,” said Andrew Anagnost, CEO, Autodesk.

“Our goals are to provide industry and city planners with the ability to design in the context of the real world. This will allow communities to build more connected, resilient cities and infrastructure with a focused eye on sustainability.”

“Using GIS and BIM as a single integrated system provides decision-makers with a holistic understanding of how an infrastructure project will impact the community and environment, supporting sustainable outcomes,” said Jack Dangermond, Esri president.

“Integrating Basemaps and ArcGIS Living Atlas layers with Autodesk products unlocks added context of the natural and built worlds, combining visual appeal and up-to-date maps and layers from the global community.”

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National Highways, which operates, maintains and improves England’s motorways and major A roads, is using Esri enterprise GIS to support its Digital Roads strategy.

The government-owned company made the move to an Esri enterprise GIS over a year ago, and has since consolidated all geospatial data and applications into one spatial portal, adding new capabilities and making GIS more accessible at lower cost.

One of the major projects has been the creation of a single digital model of the Strategic Road Network (SRN) to provide staff with the same real-time view for the first time.

Control rooms across the country are now using a Single View of the Network (SVN) dashboard which has incident alerts, details of roadworks, weather updates and the location of traffic officers available on an interactive map.

According to Esri, benefits to date include being able to predict problem locations and deploy traffic officers more quickly, better coordination of roadworks to reduce disruption and optimising traffic flows to reduce congestion and emissions.

It also removes the need to maintain multiple road models within multiple systems. Through these efficiencies, National Highways has reportedly decreased its total cost of GIS ownership by more than 10% compared to two years ago.

“We are always looking for new ways to make people’s journeys smoother and safer on our roads and we are now able to react more swiftly to incidents to get traffic moving again as quickly as possible,” said National Highways Chief Data Officer, Davin Crowley-Sweet.

“Meanwhile, our vision for the digital roads of the future will incorporate new capabilities, such as digital twins, predictive planning, single view of assets, and connected autonomous vehicles. Each of these initiatives will require a common, trusted representation of the network to be successful.”

Spatial data in the SRN model includes information on over 4,000 miles of highway, bridges, tunnels and other assets including road signs and cameras.

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