Between the Poles

Urgent: Standards-based geospatial + BIM interoperability requires broad vendor participation

At the International Standards Summit 2019 in Düsseldorf a group of people representing owners, engineering and construction firms, vendors and services providers in the AEC space, and standards organization Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) and buildingSMART International (bSI) were invited to meet to discuss ways to move forward in promoting a standards-based approach to geospatial + BIM interoperability.

The BIM and geospatial interoperability challenge is the latest symptom of the broader problem of integrating AEC and geospatial workflows, that has contributed to low productivity in the construction sector.  One of the areas of broad agreement at the meetup was that developing a standards-based approach to the BIM+geospatial interoperability problem is urgent.  There are two reasons for this.

The first is that there is growing evidence of the significant business benefits of an integrated BIM+geospatial full lifecycle approach to construction. Design-build-finance-maintain (DBFM), build-operate-transfer (BOT), and public-private-partnerships (PPP) are among the projects that have reported positive benefits of an integrated approach.

The second reason for urgency is that without standards proprietary interoperability will become the de facto standard. In November 2017 the BIM and geospatial market-leaders Autodesk and ESRI announced an agreement to address the interoperability problem. Since then both ESRI and Auto desk have been busy implementing proprietary ways to bring each other's data into their software environment.

ArcGIS is ESRI's market-leading GIS product.  Revit is Autodesk's market-leading BIM application that is utilized by designers for vertical BIM (buildings), although there are landscape architects that have managed to use it as well. Revit models include spatial data and related non-spatial information.  With the release of ArcGIS Pro 2.2 in June 2018 direct reading of Revit BIM (.RVT) files is now supported. In the past Revit models had to be imported through conversion to IFC (Industry Foundation Classes) files and then go through a second conversion to an ESRI geodatabase.  ArcGIS Pro 2.2 makes it possible to open a Revit BIM model directly. Tools are provided for correctly georeferencing BIM models in ArcGIS. Revit data added to ArcGIS behaves like any other 3D GIS data and can be queried, measured and analyzed.

InfraWorks is Autodesk's application that allows civil engineers to design roads and highways in context. InfraWorks 19.2, released in September 2018, now supports the Autodesk Connector for ArcGIS. Designers and engineers can bring GIS content from ArcGIS Online into InfraWorks allowing content such as roads, pipelines, and electrical transformers to be directly imported. The link is dynamic making it possible to build an InfraWorks model directly from GIS data published into ArcGIS Online. When the GIS data is updated, the InfraWorks model can be updated and refreshed. With the release of Autodesk Civil 3D 2019 InfraWorks models can be brought into Civil 3D, Autodesk's civil design product. Together these enhancements enable workflows from ArcGIS through InfraWorks to Civil 3D.

Together these implementations represent a proprietary (but incomplete) solution to the BIM+geospatial interoperability challenge.  If you happen to use Tekla, Bentley BIM, Vectorworks or Graphisoft as your BIM software or QGIS, GeoServer/MapServer/PostGIS, GeoMedia, MapInfo, Manifold, or Smallworld as your GIS software, this does not begin to solve your problem.  The objective of the OGC/buildingSMART partnership is to provide a standards-bases solution to the interoperability problem. The Integrated Digital Built Environment Subcommittee (IDBE SC) was founded to increase interoperability between the geospatial and built environment domains, specifically through coordination of standards development activities of the OGC and buildingSMART International (bSI).

At the meetup in Düsseldorf IDBE was represented by Hans-Christoph Gruler of Leica Geosystems, Leif Granholm of Trimble and Jim Plume of bSI Australasia. Also present were representatives of Bentley Systems, NavVis, Solibri(Nemetschek), Schiphol Airport, Hong Kong Housing Authority, Royal Haikoning, CRB, think project!, and others.  Together these folks represent owners, the construction sector, and vendors. 

A second conclusion of the meetup is that the IDBE SC needs more involvement from all sectors of the construction industry, but especially broader representation from vendors and owners. To date most of the efforts that I am aware of involve attempting to map the OGC standard CityGML to bSI's IFC standard.  It is fair to say that the research to date has shown that this is not possible in general.  Leif Granholm has championed another approach to the problem that moves interoperability up the stack from data models to the software level.  To be successful this requires participation from the major vendors in the geospatial  and BIM spaces. Owners, especially government, can encourage a standards-based as opposed to a proprietary approach to interoperability by mandating or requiring standards in RFIs, RFPs and contracts.

Autodesk signals commitment to BIM + geospatial integration for improving construction productivity

We are beginning to see data from real world projects that offer tangible evidence of the benefits of an integrated BIM+geospatial full lifecycle approach for construction projects.  A few firms such as Parsons Brinckerhoff, Atkins Global, and several Dutch firms including Arcadis and Royal BAM, in the construction sector realized a number of years ago that BIM+geospatial integration provide greater value to projects that involve not just design and construction but also operations and maintenance.  Recently Autodesk, arguably the market leader in BIM design software, has been signaling its commitment to geospatial + BIM integration, joining other firms in the construction software industry in improving construction workflows involving BIM and geospatial data and applications.

The BIM and geospatial interoperability challenge is the latest symptom of the broader problem of integrating AEC and geospatial workflows, that has contributed to low productivity in the construction sector.  Fashioning AEC and geospatial data into an efficient data flow from planning through design and construction to operations and maintenance has been an ongoing challenge for owners for decades.  The Between The Poles blog is over ten years old and one of the persistent themes from the very beginning in 2006 was the challenge of integrating CAD and GIS data and applications into efficient workflows (some examples; 2006, 2007, 2008 ).

A few firms such as Parsons Brinckerhoff, Atkins Global, and several Dutch firms including Arcadis and Royal BAM, in the construction sector realized a number of years ago that BIM+geospatial integration provide greater value to projects that involve not just design and construction but also operations and maintenance. It has been shown that BIM+geospatial integration provide greater value to projects that involve not just design and construction but also operations and maintenance. A leader in this procurement space, Rijkswaterstaat, the Dutch transportation authority, began offering design-build-finance-maintain (DBFM) projects a number of years ago which has motivated private Dutch engineering and construction companies to adopt an integrated geospatial+BIM approach to construction. For example, the firm Royal BAM Group nv/BAM Infraconsult adopted integrated BIM + geospatial because of market developments including more complex construction assignments and an increasing demand from customers for service provision throughout the entire life cycle of a project.   AECOM, which is a US$18.2 billion a year firm in the construction sector and has been ranked for eight years running it has been ranked #1 in Engineering News Record‘s “Top 500 Design Firms”, uses BIM + GIS on design, build, finance and operate (DBFO) projects including the external campus of Denver International Airport, and to lease management at Orlando, Hong Kong, and South West Florida international airports.

Major firms in the construction software industry such as Hexagon, Trimble, and Bentley have integrated geospatial + BIM to varying degrees in their approach to construction for years.  For example, Bentley decided fifteen years ago to support real-world coordinate systems in all of their products including Microstation. Bentley calls this capability geo-coordination and it provides a location-aware foundation which facilitates workflows that require integrated engineering and geospatial data and applications. According to Bentley geo-coordination adds value for asset performance with a very high return on that investment.  Integrating CAD and GIS into an efficient workflow for records management (aka network documentation) has been a challenge for utility and telecom operators for decades. While utility and telecom operators have found ways to address this problem, it is rare to find the benefits for these systems quantified. At Year in Infrastructure 2019 iForte Solusi Infotek presented concrete benefits of a records management system integrating CAD and geospatial worklows that has been in operation for several years for managing their fiber optic networks in Jakarta and on the rest of Java. For these activities iForte estimated that it has realized a return on investment of 203% over three years. The primary benefits of the new system were realized in planning, network maintenance and sales, and there were a number of intangible other benefits.

Over a year ago Jack Dangermond and Andrew Anagnost announced a partnership to build a bridge between Autodesk and ESRI technologies.  I have reviewed the technical progress that the two companies have made in furthering interoperability between the AEC and geospatial worlds which suggests that the new relationship between Autodesk and ESRI appears to be being translated into concrete actions. There is a considerable distance to go yet, but there are grounds for optimism that there is a commitment to BIM and geospatial interoperability so that in the future workflows that involve both AEC and geospatial data and software will be able to surmount the CAD+GIS barriers that have represented major inefficiencies for the construction, utility and other sectors for decades. 

Further evidence of a serious commitment to furthering efficient integrated BIM and geospatial workflows is provided in a recent article in Geospatial World by Nicolas Mangon, Vice President of AEC, Business Strategy & Marketing at Autodesk, has acknowledged that "there is a growing recognition in the collective AEC industry that geography provides a common language for collaborating on projects." Furthermore, "bringing GIS technologies and BIM processes together provides a broader and deeper understanding of infrastructure in the larger context of the built and natural environment by integrating information and content."  Expanding on the recently announced Autodesk and ESRI partnership, Mangon says that "Autodesk is bringing that knowledge from manufacturing to AEC and our ESRI partnership allows us to improve the way we create spatially accurate digtial representations of the physical. Our current plan is to expand the integration further into our detailed design applications like Civil3D but also connect GIS data into out cloud BIM platform."   This is an important statement from the market leader in BIM software and suggests that the days when architects, engineers, and construction contractors work with an isolated 0,0 coordinate system are numbered.

This is another signal from a major player in the BIM design space of a serious commitment to overcoming the BIM/geospatial integration challenge and ending the decades long clash of tectonic plates between the AEC and geospatial worlds that has contributed to low productivity in construction, utilities, telecommunications and other industries.  It will also an important first step toward the development of maintainable near real-time digital twins of urban infrastructure.

Growing evidence of the benefits of an integrated BIM+geospatial full lifecycle approach to construction

Building information modeling (BIM) has been applied to design-build construction projects for many years. A growing number of countries are mandating BIM for public projects.  While the UK government has said that "...we know that the largest prize for BIM lies in the operational stages of the project life-cycle", until recently there has not been hard data to support this conjecture.  Similarly there has been only anecdotal support for an integrated BIM and geospatial approach for design, build, operate and maintain projects.   Now we are beginning to see data from real world projects that offer evidence for the benefits of an integrated BIM+geospatial full lifecycle approach for construction projects.

The McKinsey Global Institute estimates that the world will need to spend $57 trillion on infrastructure through 2030 to keep up with global GDP growth. This is a massive incentive for the  construction industry to transform productivity and project delivery through new technologies and improved practices.  McKinsey reports that large construction projects typically take 20 percent longer to finish than scheduled and are up to 80 percent over budget. Construction productivity has actually declined in some markets since the 1990s and financial returns for contractors are relatively low and volatile.  Construction has been slow to adopt process and technological innovations. R&D spending in construction lags most other industries - construction R&D  is less than 1% of total industry revenue compared to 3.5-4.5 % in the auto and aerospace sectors.  McKinsey & Company suggests that the construction industry is ripe for disruption and two of the technologies that it believes will be key in that anticipated transformation are geospatial and BIM. 

The UK Government as part of its building information modeling (BIM) initiative has said repeatedly that it expects the big payoff of a digital model will be during operations and maintenance, which typically represents 80% of the cost of a facility.  Companies who take on design, build, and maintain and/or operate projects find significant benefits from a full lifecycle BIM + geospatial strategy. For example, EllisDon in Canada considers BIM+geospatial as best practice for its PPP projects, Rijkswaterstaat pioneered design, build, finance, and maintain (DBFM) projects in the Netherlands, Crossrail, which is currently the largest engineering project in Europe, has adopted this approach, Malaysian firm PESTECH International Berhad employs this approach for build, operate and transmit (BOT) projects, and major U.S. construction firm AECOM is applying BIM+geospatial on large design, build finance and operate (DBFO) projects. But to date there has been little reported quantitative evidence supporting the benefits of this approach.  This is changing with several projects providing estimates of benefits including ROI of an integrated BIM+geospatial full lifecycle approach to construction projects.

Integrated BIM+geospatial full lifecycle approach to construction

On many projects information provided by the construction contractor is handed over months after completion of the project. It can take the operator of the facility a year to go through this information to find the information required to operate the facility. This period is what is called the "blind spot" corresponding to the time the facility operator is managing the facility with limited information. Since for many types of equipment the highest probability of failure is in their first month or two of operation - just during the period that the building operator often doesn't have access to information about warranties and extended warranties - this increases the risk of equipment and even facility failures. In addition there is a cost associated with just finding the information required to service equipment. A NIST study across several industries estimated that the cost associated with this is 23 cents/square foot which adds considerable cost to operating the facility.

A full lifecycle facilities information flow starts with a facilities information specification from the owner identifying the building information to be included as part of the final deliverables at the time of commissioning.  The facilities information specification is part of the contract between the owner and the designers and contractors who will construct the building.  The facilities information required by the owner's specification are entered into the BIM database during design and construction by the designers and contractors.  At the completion of construction the facilities information data collected by the designers and contractors and stored with the BIM model in digital form represents a key deliverable to the owner together with the BIM model.   The facilities information can then be used to populate the building manager's asset management/facilities management system database including links to the BIM model of the facility to identify where each element or piece of equipment can be found. Most of the spatial and non-spatial data collected during construction is useful during operations. 100 % of floor plans and most of the 3D model (geometry and associated data) are needed in operations. Some owners find that just the BIM model including geometry and associated data is adequate for managing the facility. Others augment the BIM model by a Computerized Maintenance Management System (CMMS) which adds financial, occupancy, maintenance history and other information.

In an award winning paper at a 2011 conference organized by Britain’s Association for Geographic Information (AGI), Ann Kemp, then head of GIS at Atkins Global, the design and engineering firm, asked the question ‘BIM isn’t geospatial — or is it?’ and then argued that integration of geospatial and BIM was essential to address the challenges of the 21st century.  The need to integrate geospatial and BIM has been gaining traction for some time.

BIM+geospatial integration provide greater value to projects that involve not just design and construction but also operations and maintenance.  A leader in this space, Rijkswaterstaat, the Dutch transportation authority, began offering design-build-finance-maintain (DBFM) projects a number of years ago which has motivated private Dutch engineering and construction companies to adopt an integrated geospatial+BIM approach to construction.

A few firms such as Parsons Brinckerhoff, Atkins Global, and several Dutch firms including Arcadis and Royal BAM, in the construction sector realized a number of years ago that BIM+geospatial integration provide greater value to projects that involve not just design and construction but also operations and maintenance.  For example, the firm Royal BAM Group nv/BAM Infraconsult adopted integrated BIM + geospatial because of market developments including more complex construction assignments and an increasing demand from customers for service provision throughout the entire life cycle of a project. 

Geolocation plays a key role in integrating GIS and engineering data and applications for optimizing asset management workflows.  One of the foundations for an integrated system of this type is Bentley's decision many years ago to geospatially-enable all of their products Bentley calls this capability geocoordination. It provides a location-aware foundation for workflows that require integrated engineering and geospatial data and applications.

Benefits of Integrated BIM+geospatial full lifecycle construction

Recently, Microdesk has reported case studies including hospitals, a medical research facility, an airport and a university. For each facility several use cases were included in the ROI analysis.  For example, dealing with plumbing leaks, electric power shutdowns, passing on tribal knowledge from senior staff to new hires, and conducting infectious risk assessment (ICRA/PCRA), and so on.  After introducing BIM models for facilities and asset management, FM staff were surveyed and asked whether they found dealing with a plumbing leak, for example, using BIM easier, the same or more difficult than the traditional approach. The analysis quantified the time required to resolve a plumbing leak before and after the introduction of BIM.

Two very interesting examples of the ROI analysis performed by Microdesk relate to maintenance operations in a hospital. Passing tribal knowledge on from the older generation of FM staff to the younger involves a junior FM staffer accompanying a senior staff member walking the building for about a month. This requires about 200 hours of staff time. The hospital hires about 12 people per year so this amounts to 2400 hours per year. With BIM and virtual reality (VR) this was reduced to 22 hrs per person, a very significant staff time savings.  In another example, a review of infectious risk assessment (ICRA/PCRA) analysis in a hospital takes about 152 hrs and this has to be repeated 200 times per year. With BIM the time required to conduct these analysis was reduced to 74 hrs per review saving 15,600 hrs annually.

At the conclusion of five years running on the projects, the ROI analysis found a positive BIM in all cases, and estimated that introducing BIM for FM saved on average 5 % of operating costs per annum. It was estimated that introducing BIM reduced the time looking for things by 83% of the 23 cents per square foot cost for doing this from the NIST study. Since operations and maintenance are roughly 75% of the total cost of a facility, these results represents a substantial savings over the full lifecycle of a building.

The Napgur Metro, which is a US$1.3 billion project underway in Nagpur, is the first project in Asia to integrate a digital twin with an asset management system to eliminate information loss about assets during design and construction.   A 23 digit asset code was used to link 3D models developed using Bentley BIM tools with SAP financial management making it possible to track assets right from design through to operation and maintenance. BIM best practices followed the British PAS 1192 guidelines. Since the Nagpur system implements a full-lifecycle approach to project management, the location of each of the 500,000 assets comprising the systems is recorded making it possible to click on an asset in SAP and be shown the location of the asset in a 3D map.  Final deliverables are digital models rather than paper drawings providing a basis for digitalizing operations and maintenance.  The benefits of a 3D BIM+geospatial approach have been projected based on a 25 year lifetime for the project.  It is estimated that this will result in US$400,000 savings during plan, design and build, a reduction in operating manpower requirements by 20%, and increased availability and reliability.  The really big payoff is an estimated savings of US$222 million over the lifetime of the project.

 

PESTECH International Berhad, the winner of a Year in Infrastructure award, used geocoordinated digital design for the development of a new substation Kratie and Kampong Cham, Cambodia.  The decision to use geocordinated design technology for this project was partially motivated by the requirement that the company would not only be responsible for designing and building the substation but also for operating it for a period of 25 years before transferring it to the utility.

 

A number of projects in the Netherlands have been initiated by Rijkswaterstaat (RWS), the Dutch highway authority, using a design-build-finance-maintain (DBFM) approach. The Rijkswaterstaat (RWS) board is convinced of the benefits of BIM and BIM/geospatial integration and rolled out BIM/geospatial for four DBFM projects with the intention to require BIM on all DBFM-contracts in the future. Royal BAM Group nv / BAM Infraconsult was responsible for several of these projects.  A DBFM project at BAM starts with 2D geographic data that is visualized through a GIS web portal. The web portal gives everyone on the team an early perspective on the project site including underground utilities and aboveground structures before design begins. During the tender process the geospatial data is combined with 3D data including 3D representations of nearby natural and man-made features as well as proposed designs to create a 3D environment for assessing alternative designs. The 3D environment improves collaboration among the team members as well as enabling better communication with the client through 3D visualization of proposed designs. After award, the first step is conducting LiDAR scans of the site/proposed route. At completion of construction, the data collected during design and construction is migrated to an integrated GIS + asset management system system to support maintenance activities. 

 

In Canada public–private partnership (P3) have been remarkably successful for building and maintaining infrastructure. For EllisDon, a major construction and building services company, integrated BIM + geospatial is considered best practices on full lifecycle projects P3 projects in Canada.  EllisDon was involved in its first P3 project in Canada fifteen years ago. Since then the P3 business has grown and now P3 is a big part of EllisDon's business. For P3 projects EllisDon builds a wide variety types of structures including hospitals. In the P3 world the contractor often shares the risk of operating and/or maintaining a facility for an extended period. This means that people who are going to be running and managing a facility need to be involved in designing the facility right from the beginning. It is necessary to cost out the lifecycle of each piece of equipment whether it be a carpet, baseboard or cooling unit because you have to be able to maintain it and at the end of the 30 year period you are expected to turn over a hospital that looks brand new. For this reason P3 projects are very different from design+build projects.

 

AECOM, which is a US$18.2 billion a year firm in the construction sector and has been ranked for eight years running it has been ranked #1 in Engineering News Record‘s “Top 500 Design Firms”, uses BIM + GIS on design, build, finance and operate (DBFO) projects around the world.  At AECOM, the discussion has shifted from CAD/BIM alone to include geospatial and its capabilities specifically for design, build finance and operate (DBFO) projects. This mirrors the Dutch experience with design, build, finance and maintain (DBFM) projects encouraged by the Dutch highway authority. AECOM has found that by adding real world coordinates they increase the value and types of data for all stakeholders across the entire lifecycle. Integrated geospatial + BIM connects data types together. BIM holds the utility content and GIS is a visual platform for maintenance linked to a maintenance workflow. AECOM has applied this approach to the external campus of Denver International Airport, and to lease management at Orlando, Hong Kong, and South West Florida international airports. For the West Kowloon Cultural District (WKCD) in Hong Kong AECOM developed and maintains a central repository with district-wide data from various sources including all operational data - architectural planning and engineering- for the district. The advantage of an integrated BIM+GIS approach based on a centralized integration of information is that it allows the client to make strategic decisions during the design, build and operate phases of the construction lifecycle.

BIM+geospatial interoperability

Fashioning AEC and geospatial data into an efficient data flow from planning through design and construction to operations and maintenance represented a challenge that remains a problem for owners.  The Between The Poles blog is over ten years old and one of the persistent themes from the very beginning in 2006 was the challenge of integrating CAD and GIS data and applications in an efficient workflow (some examples; 2006, 2007, 2008 ). It is indicative of the importance of the integration of BIM and geospatial data and technologies that Autodesk and ESRI, 800 lb gorillas in their respective areas of AEC and GIS, have announced an agreement (for the second time) to collaborate to help bridge the gap between CAD/BIM and GIS/geospatial. 

 

Over the past decade, there has been impressive progress in developing open standards for the integration of geospatial and AEC (architecture, engineering and construction) views of city infrastructure which provides a standards-based basis for full lifecycle management from design through to operations and maintenance of infrastructure projects. 

 

The Netherlands has led in the development and application of open BIM+geospatial standards‎ in the construction industry. The Netherlands has created a BIM Gateway that is intended to be a national portal for information about open BIM standards including related geospatial standards. 

In the AEC world Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) are the open and neutral data format standard for the exchange of building information models (BIM) that is widely used in the AEC (architecture, engineering, and construction)  sector.  The IFC standard was developed and is supported by buildingSMART International.   The IFC BIM standard is used in the construction industry in many countries and is mandated in countries such as Finland.  The first versions of IFC were intended for buildings (vertical BIM).  Recently buildingSMART initiated the IFC for Infrastructure project to extend the IFC standard to support linear transportation infrastructure (horizontal BIM or BIM for Infrastructure) such as rail, road, bridges, and tunnels. 

In the geospatial world a widely used international geospatial standard for cities is CityGML.  Thomas Kolbe and co-workers are the developers of the CityGML standard that has been adopted by the Open Geospatial Consortium.  Kolbe et al. are translating a vision of the city as an interactive system comprised of functional components, utility networks connecting components, and interdependencies between utility networks into standards-based intelligent models that can be used to analyze urban environments for a variety of purposes including risk- and disaster management energy consumption, carbon balancing and city life-cycle management.

Currently CityGML includes 3D geometry, topology, semantics, and appearance for urban environments. CityGML also supports a standard mechanism for adding extensions, called Application Domain Extensions (ADEs).  There are several Application Domain Extensions (ADEs) that have been developed to extend CityGML to other domains.  For example,  I blogged about a basic extension UtilityNetworksADE that was proposed for city utility networks.  The INSPIRE Data Specifications Annex III contains use case encodings and a data model for Buildings the development of which was strongly influenced by CityGML. There have been attempts to integrate or at least develop a mapping between IFC and CityGML. 

A major breakthrough in bringing the architectural and geospatial views onto a common footing is the OGC LandInfra Conceptual Model developed by the OGC in cooperation with buildingSMART International and approved as an OGC standard in August, 2016.  LandInfra  was developed by Bentley Systems, Leica Geosystems, Trimble, Australian Government Department of Communications, Autodesk, Vianova Systems AS, and buildingSMART International and provides a unifying basis for land and civil engineering standards including the OGC's InfraGML and buildingSmart International's IFC for infrastructure standards.  

buildingSmart International's IFC-Alignment project uses this common conceptual model of alignments for roads, railways, tunnels and bridges.  The objectives of the IFC-Alignment project is to enable the exchange of alignment information through the full infrastructure lifecyle from planning through design and construction to asset management. On the geospatial side  InfraGML is the OGC's application schema supporting land development and civil engineering infrastructure facilities.

Open source support for AEC/geospatial interoperability

Where there are recognized open standards, there are more often then not open source projects supporting those standards.  mago3D is a new open source 3D geo-platform.  It is open source and integrates many well-known open source geospatial products and APis.  The importance of this technology is that it shows that it is possible using the available open source, geospatial APis and tools - together with some genuine innovative development - to create an open, non-proprietary 3D geospatial platform for integrating geospatial and BIM. Given the critical importance of addressing the cultural and technical divide between the AEC and geospatial worlds, a viable open source alternative is essential for developing the innovative solutions to the challenge of interfacing the two worlds. 

Bentley has announced that it intends to build its products supporting digital twins around an open source project already on Github called iModel.js.  Bentley is committing its resources to developing an ecosystem around iModel.js. To quote Keith Bentley this is a huge change in direction for Bentley although Bentley had puts its toes in the open source water previously.  Bentley used open source geospatial components to develop a new front-end for its leading road and rail asset management system AssetWise Lifecycle Information Management solution (ALIM).  Bentley has also partnered with AGI to support the open source Cesium project.

Conclusion

As owners see the advantages of design, build, operate and/or maintain projects and are beginning to changing their procurement practices, construction companies are changing their  business processes to optimize facility maintenance and operation.  Construction companies that have taken on the challenge of design, build, operate and maintain projects are realizing that there are significant benefits from an integrated BIM+geospatial approach to full lifecycle construction.   The advantages of an integrated BIM+geospatial approach have remained for the most part company internal.  Now it appears that the word is getting out.  Standards organizations in both the AEC and geospatial worlds are making progress on BIM+geospatial interoperability.  Major software vendors Autodesk and ESRI have announced an agreement to partner for greater interoperability between their products.  The open source community is also addressing the issue of BIM+geospatial interoperability. We are now beginning to see data from real world projects that offer quantitative evidence for the benefits of an integrated BIM+geospatial full lifecycle approach for construction projects.

3D BIM + geospatial full lifecycle metro rail project aims at eliminating data loss

This year's winner of a special recognition award at Year in Infrastructure was Maharashtra Metro Rail Corporation Ltd for its Nagpur Metro Asset Information Management System which implemented a digital twin and a tagging scheme right from design with the goal of eliminating information loss over the life-cycle of the project.  It is estimated that this will save US$ 222 million over the 25 years of operation of the metro rail system.

 

The UK Government as part of its building information modeling (BIM) initiative has said repeatedly that it expects the big payoff of a digital twin, estimated at more than 40% savings, will be during operations and maintenance, typically representing 80% of the total cost of a facility.  Companies such as BAM who do Design, Build, Finance and Maintain (DBFM) projects report significant benefits from full lifecycle BIM + geospatial.  But there is little if any quantitative evidence supporting this conjecture.  I have asked people from Finland familiar with the very early BIM developments in that country if there were studies of the benefits of BIM for operations and maintenance, but apparently the BIM focus there has been entirely on design and build.   Crossrail with a budget of £14.8 billion is the biggest engineering project in Europe.  The most interesting aspect of the Crossrail project is a 3D digital twin that has not only been used during design and construction, but is intended to be used for operations and maintenance.  Crossrail appears to be one of the first major projects that may be able to provide support for the conjecture that the biggest benefits of BIM + geospatial are for operations and maintenance. 

 

One of the first quantitative estimates of the benefits of a 3D BIM+geospatial full lifecycle project strategy I have seen was offered by this year's a winner of a special recognition award at Bentley's Year in Infrastructure in London.  Maharashtra Metro Rail Corporation Ltd's Nagpur Metro Asset Information Management System has implemented a digital twin and a tagging scheme right from design with the goal of eliminating information loss over the life-cycle of the project.

 

The Napgur Metro is a US$1.3 billion project underway in Nagpur, a city of 3.5 million in the Indian state of Maharashtra.  This is the first project in Asia to integrate a digital twin with an asset management system to eliminate information loss about assets during design and construction.   A 23 digit asset code was used to link 3D models developed using Bentley BIM tools with SAP financial management making it possible to track assets right from design through to operation and maintenance. BIM best practices followed the British PAS 1192 guidelines. Since the Nagpur system implements a full-lifecycle approach to project management, the location of each of the 500,000 assets comprising the systems is recorded making it possible to click on an asset in SAP and be shown the location of the asset in a 3D map. QR codes are used to track different versions of drawings. Final deliverables are digital models (Bentley iModels) rather than paper drawings providing a basis for digitalizing operations and maintenance.

 

The benefits of a 3D BIM+geospatial approach have been projected based on a 25 year lifetime for the project.  It is expected that this will result in US$400,000 savings during plan, design and build, a reduction in operating manpower requirements by 20%, and increased availability and reliability.  The really big payoff is an estimated savings of US$222 million over the lifetime of the project. 

 

Geolocation plays a key role in integrating GIS and engineering data and applications for optimizing asset management workflows.  One of the foundations for an integrated system of this type is Bentley's decision many years ago to geospatially-enable all of their products Bentley calls this capability geocoordination. It provides a location-aware foundation for workflows that require integrated engineering and geospatial data and applications.

Firm realizes ROI of 203% by integrating CAD and GIS for fiber network management

Integrating CAD and GIS into an efficient workflow for records management (aka network documentation) has been a challenge for utility and telecom operators for decades.  While utility and telecom operators have found ways to address this problem, it is rare to find the benefits for these systems quantified.  At Year in Infrastructure this year iForte Solusi Infotek presented concrete benefits of a records management system that has been in operation for several years for managing their fiber optic networks in Jakarta and on the rest of Java.

I began working in the utility and telecom sector in 1993, specifically in developing software for records management (called network documentation outside of North America).  At that time the magnitude of the AEC+geospatial cultural mismatch problem was just beginning to be appreciated by utilities and telecoms.  Planners tend to use GIS tools, engineers and designers CAD tools, construction folks in the field paper CAD drawings, and asset managers GIS integrated with their FM tools. Fashioning engineering and geospatial data into an efficient data flow from planning through design and construction to operations and maintenance represented a challenge that remains a problem for utilities and telecom companies. The Between The Poles blog is over ten years old and one of the persistent themes from the very beginning in 2006 was the challenge of integrating CAD and GIS data and applications in an efficient workflow (some examples; 2006, 2007, 2008 ).

The winner of this year's Year in Infrastructure Award for Communications Networks was a project of iForte Solusi Infotek.   iForte is a fast-growing fiber network operator with many large corporate customers all over Java island including Jakarta.  From this base it plans to expand into the rest of Indonesia.  iForte was facing many of the problems associated with paper-based records management in a fast-growing network operator. Prior to implementing the new system, their business processes were characterized by a plethora of paper-based manual processes. The data available for network planning was continually out of date making it difficult to compile an accurate situational assessment. Maintenance crews in the field had to rely on their own hand written notes on paper records. When sales staff met with a prospective customer it took an hour or more to collect the required information to determine the availability of fiber optic capacity at the customer's location requiring subsequent exchanges of emails to get the requisite information to the customer by which time the customer may have contacted a competitor.

The primary benefits of the new system were realized in planning, network maintenance and sales. 

• Maintenance crews could redline existing as-builts in the field so that engineering could see immediately where a problem had occurred and any temporary infrastructure the maintenance team had put in place to address the problem.
• Planning could see real-time cable utilization to identify congested networks. When there was an outage they could see the total capacity that was at risk.  It also enabled them to find alternatives for re-routing the network.  It was also found that network expansion planning could be completed four times faster. They were also able to use less fiber, saving on material costs and CAPEX. For example in one case, by looking at available capacity and utilization, it was possible to reduce new cable requirements from 1,400 meter to 100.
• For sales prior to implementing the records management system, determining fibre availability for a customer required on average of 60 minutes necessitating telephone calls to records. After implementing the new system, they were able to determine availability in six minutes and automatically generate a bill of materials and a job estimate.

For these activities iForte estimated that it has realized a return on investment of 203% over three years.

The primary benefits of the new system were realized in planning, network maintenance and sales, but there were intangible benefits as well.  Management was able to see the status of the network in real-time, review progress in building out the network on a map with demographics, assess the status of their network assets, and identify regions for network expansion.  The intangible value to the company achieved with the new system was operational excellence and improved strategic planning which provided for better performance and growth compared to competitors.

Geolocation plays a key role in integrating GIS and engineering data and applications for optimizing asset management workflows.  One of the reasons for the success of iForte's system is that Bentley decided many years ago to geospatially-enable all of their products including Microstation.  Bentley calls this capability geocoordination. It provides a location-aware foundation which facilitates workflows that require integrated engineering and geospatial data and applications.

Advanced BIM modeling at US Corps of Engineers includes GIS

The mission of BIMForum, part of the Associated General Contractors of America (AGC), is to further the adoption of BIM in the construction industry in the U.S. At this year's annual BIMForum conference Johnny Fortune and Steve Hutsell of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) gave a presentation about advanced BIM modeling and how it ensures that the requirements of advanced modeling are met not only on its design/build projects but also in managing the 500,000 sites that the USACE operates and maintains. As a result of the full-lifecycle perspective at USACE advanced modeling includes not only BIM and BIM for infrastructure (called civil information modeling or CIM at USACE), but also GIS.

Since 2006 USACE has been required to use BIM for all projects over $3 million. Its goals in developing advanced modeling include improved collaboration among stakeholders, improved design and construction processes, reduced risk, fewer errors and omissions, and higher quality design and construction quality.

But USACE not only designs and builds facilities. It is also responsible for operating and maintaining some 500,000 sites around the world. Therefore one of the key goals of the advanced modeling initiative is enabling more complete information-loaded deliverables so that data and information is not lost through the planning, design, build and operate and maintain life-cycle (See USACE Roadmap for Life-cycle BIM with supplements for Autodesk and Bentley). USACE has found that integrating GIS along with BIM into the life-cycle is a key enabler for full-lifecycle BIM.

USACE has been been working with industry through consortia to define clear advanced modeling requirements for their projects. The have developed a toolbox of documents, templates, tools, checklist and guides to enable the advanced modeling goals of USACE which are also used by other Department of Defense (DoD) agencies. As an example, one of tools is the minimum model matrix, which defines a minimum level of development (LoD) for each element which must be modeled. This includes not only the standard LoD categories 100, 200, 300 but also whether the element must be modeled in 3D, 2.5D, or 3D.

USACE is also part of the FedBIM Working Group which includes many federal agencies outside of DoD which means that USACE's toolkit is a model for other federal agencies.

British guidelines for BIM targeting 33% savings in TOTEX to become international ISO standards

The BS 1192 suite of guidelines and best practices developed under the auspices of the BSI, the national standards body of the UK, are designed to help the UK construction industry adopt BIM Level 2 and applies to both building and infrastructure assets. These standards target 33% savings over the full life-cycle of a building or infrastructure asset. BSI has announced that beginning this year the BS 1192 British standards will become international ISO standards.

An introduction to BIM Level 2 for folks for whom BIM is new can be found here.

BS 1192 (2007 + 2016)

The principles for information sharing and modelling of BIM Level 2 are outlined in this standard. BS 1192 provides a ‘best-practice’ method for the development, organization and management of production information for the construction industry and provides the template for common naming conventions and approaches to collaborative working for use in architecture, engineering and construction. It is also designed to assist efficient data use in facilities management.

Will be replaced in 2018 by;
"BS EN ISO 19650–1 Organization of information about construction works – Information management using building information modelling – Part 1: Concepts and principles."

PAS 1192-2 (2013)

PAS 1192-2 focuses on project delivery, specifically, the graphical data, non-graphical data and documents that are accumulated from design and construction activities.

Will be replaced in 2018 by;
"BS EN ISO 19650-2 Organization of information about construction works – Information management using building information modelling – Part 2: Delivery phase of assets."

PAS 1192-3 (2014)

PAS 1192-3 addresses the recognition that the cost of operating and maintaining buildings and facilities can represent up to 85% of the whole-life cost of a facility. PAS 1192-3 provides guidance to asset managers on how to integrate asset management during operations and maintenance with the accumulation of information about assets during design and construction. The UK government has targeted cost savings of 33% across the entire life-cycle of a facility by implementing the processes outlined in PAS 1192-2 and PAS 1192-3.

Will be replaced in 2020 by;
"BS EN ISO 19650-3 Organization of information about construction works – Information management using building information modelling – Part 3: Operational phase of assets."

PAS 1192-5 (2015)

PAS 1192-5 outlines the cyber-security vulnerabilities to hostile attack when using BIM and provides an assessment process to determine the levels of cyber-security for BIM collaboration which should be applied during all phases of the life-cycle.

Will be replaced in 2020 by;
"BS EN ISO 19650-5 Organization of information about construction works – Information management using building information modelling – Part 5: Specification for security-minded building information modelling, digital built environments and smart asset management."

The announcement by the BSI did not include two other parts of the suite;

• BS 1192 4 (2014) outlines the UK usage of COBie, an internationally agreed information exchange schema for exchanging facility information between the employer and the supply chain.
• BS 8536-1 (2015) aims to involve the operator of the facility from the outset by documenting building performance requirements early in the design phase to ensure that designers design for optimum performance of a facility.

P3 drives integrated geospatial + BIM in the Canadian construction industry

Several years ago Rijkswaterstaat, the Dutch highway authority, initiated Design, Build, Finance and Maintain (DBFM) highway projects. Private Dutch engineering and construction companies bidding on these projects found that adopting an integrated geospatial + BIM approach on DBFM projects yielded significant benefits. I blogged previously about the firm Royal BAM Group nv / BAM Infraconsult that adopted an integrated BIM + geospatial full-lifecycle approach to construction because many of its projects were DBFM projects. In Canada public–private partnership (P3) have been remarkably successful for building and maintaining infrastructure. At the CanBIM 2018 Regional Session in Vancouver I had a chance to chat with Thomas Strong, Managing Director VDC at EllisDon, who said that at EllisDon integrated BIM + geospatial was considered best practices on full-lifecyle projects including P3 projects in Canada.

Background

McKinsey & Company suggests that the construction industry is ripe for disruption and two of the technologies that it believes will be key in that anticipated transformation are geospatial and BIM. Large construction projects typically take 20 percent longer to finish than scheduled and are up to 80 percent over budget. Construction productivity has actually declined in some markets since the 1990s and financial returns for contractors are relatively low and volatile. McKinsey has identified five technologies that it believes will be transformative in the construction industry. Two are geospatial technologies and BIM.  Integrated BIM + geospatial is essential to enable the full capabilities of both technologies.

Geospatial + BIM at EllisDon

Thomas Strong has an interesting background that prepared him for the 3D digital construction world. He started his career in plastic injection molding making steel molds to fabricate plastic parts for cars. In this world engineers use 3D models to fully define to the fabricators what they are going to fabricate. In 2002 he transitioned to the construction industry and found that design business processes were quite different - in the construction industry things don’t get fully defined until they are built. When he joined EllisDon, he got involved with a couple of Frank Gehry projects including the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) where contractors worked from 3D models that were provided by the architect right from the beginning. After that experience, EllisDon started to implement the use of 3D models for design, quantities, and logistics to produce schedules. Now when EllisDon tender work, they use 3D models to define the geometry and the scope of work.

Thomas has been tracking trends in the geospatial + BIM world since joining EllisDon. The use of Laser Scanning is an important new technology driving significant business at EllisDon, who did their first 3D scans in 2003 on the AGO project. EllisDon now routinely conducts scans for deviation analysis, progress tracking and to capture existing conditions related to their core business construction work as well as offering scan-to-BIM as a service. They have developed a leading edge capability for converting LiDAR scans to 3D BIM geometry very quickly and accurately. They use this capability to reverse engineer existing buildings for renovation or heritage projects. The EllisDon VDC group, which was established in 2008 and which Thomas leads, provides consulting services around 3D scanning and developing as-built models.

EllisDon was involved in its first P3 project in Canada fifteen years ago. Since then the P3 business has grown and now P3 is a big part of EllisDon's business.  For P3 projects EllisDon builds a wide variety types of structures including hospitals. In the P3 world the contractor often shares the risk of operating and/or maintaining a facility for an extended period. This means that people who are going to be running and managing a facility need to be involved in designing the facility right from the beginning. It is necessary to cost out the lifecycle of each piece of equipment whether it be a carpet, baseboard or cooling unit because you have to be able to maintain it and at the end of the 30 year period you are expected to turn over a hospital that looks brand new. For this reason P3 projects are very different from design+build projects.

Integrated geospatial+BIM is critical during the operations and maintenance phase of a building. Utilities, transportation, emergency planning, first responder access, energy performance, and evacuation management all require information about internal and external infrastructure. A common geospatial coordinate system enables a comprehensive operational view of all infrastructure including internal and external structures. Thomas explained to me that at EllisDon best practices on full lifecycle projects is to use real world coordinates. He has found that it is sometimes necessary to put a little pressure on architects and others to do because there is predilection among some architects for (0,0) coordinate systems.

It was P3 projects that got EllisDon into full lifecycle projects and led to them developing their own in-house facilities management (FM) group.  As EllisDon's P3 business has grown, their FM has also continued to grow.  Since they are in-house, the FM folks are at the table right from the beginning of a project. EllisDon recognizes the value of the data that is collected over a project lifecyle, and the entire team is aware it's important to deliver the data for the asset in a way that can plug and play in an organized way into the asset management/facilities management platform.

Avoiding a repeat of the CAD/GIS quaqmire of the past quarter century

Yesterday at Distributech 2018 in San Antonio I listened to a talk from a consulting company contracted by an electric power utility to clean up GIS data originally sourced from CAD drawings.  This reminded me once again that is a challenge that telecommunications and cable companies and electric and water utilities have been attempting to deal with at least since the early 1990s and for some even before that.  Telecommunications and cable and leading electric power utilities resolved this problem at least a decade ago, but for some electric power and even more water utilities it remains a problem that is going to hold these utilities back when they should be accelerating their adoption of digital technologies.

I began working in the utility and telecom sector in 1993, specifically in developing software for records management (called network documentation outside of North America), and at that time the magnitude of the AEC+geospatial cultural mismatch problem was just beginning to be appreciated by utilities and telecoms. In utilities and telecoms planners tend to use GIS tools, engineers and designers CAD tools, construction folks in the field paper CAD drawings, and asset managers GIS integrated with their FM tools. Fashioning AEC and geospatial data into an efficient data flow from planning through design and construction to operations and maintenance represented a challenge that remains a problem for utilities. The Between The Poles blog is over ten years old and one of the persistent themes from the very beginning in 2006 was the challenge of integrating CAD and GIS data in a common workflow (some examples; 2006, 2007, 2008 ).

A workflow that is found at every utility and telecom involves the design-build-maintain information flow. The workflow begins with an engineer and drafter producing a design, typically a CAD drawing, which is printed for the construction contractor to use in building a facility. The contractor uses the drawing in the field and then returns it as an "as-built" to the utility's records management group, who enter it, traditionally by manually redigitizing it from the paper drawing, into a GIS that is intended to contain the digital twin of the network. The data in the GIS is used for network maintenance, outage management and other functions. The reason for the manual redigitization step is the "errors" that CAD drawings inevitably contain unless drafters are forced to adhere to "geospatial rules". This entire process is slow and error-prone and backlogs of as-builts waiting to be entered into the GIS stretch into months and even years. The result is that utility GIS data is more often than not incomplete, out-of-date, and unreliable. For example, at the beginning of the broadband revolution, telecoms needed to be able to tell customers whether they were close enough to a terminal and fiber to be eligible for ADSL. In one of the largest telecoms in the U.S. the GIS records were so incomplete and unreliable that survey teams had to be sent out at considerable cost to resurvey the location of their terminals and fiber cables.

Because there was no standards-based solution to the CAD+GIS problem, every utility and telecom has had to try to find its own solution to the problem. This problem has persisted from the 1990s and remains a problem for utilities - as I said I heard a presentation yesterday that wasn't that different from presentations on the same topic I and others gave a quarter of a century ago.

Over the years the poor CAD/GIS interoperability has cost the utility and telecom sectors considerable amounts of money. Large telecoms have spent hundreds of millions of dollars trying to cleanup their GIS data and streamline their CAD+GIS workflows. A rough back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests this problem has cost directly and indirectly trillions of dollars over the past 20 years. In addition unreliable and out-of-date network infrastructure data that results from this problem has safety implications.  

The juncture between distinct sectors each with its own technologies and business models, AEC (Autodesk, Bentley, and others) and geospatial (ESRI, Hexagon, and others), has analogies with the clash of tectonic plates and the associated incessant seismic events. In the mid-1990s pressure from customers motivated Autodesk and ESRI, 800 lb gorillas in their respective areas of CAD and GIS, to attempt to collaborate to address the CAD+GIS problem. The result of the agreement between Jack Dangermond and Carol Bartz at the time resulted in an unsuccessful product called ArcCAD, which satisfied neither CAD nor GIS users.

Averting a tectonic clash repeat: BIM+geospatial interoperability

The prospect that, by analogy with CAD+GIS problem, we could still be individually finding solutions to BIM/geospatial integration 20 years from now is discouraging. While there are parallels between CAD/GIS and BIM/geospatial, there are grounds for optimism that this time around we may find ways the address the problem in a general way. Firstly, in the mid 1990s there were virtually no geospatial or 3D AEC data standards. The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) and builsingSmart were both only founded in 1994. It required quite a while for the OGC geospatial and buildingSmart's IFC standards to broadly penetrate industry and government.  Nowadays, there are many widely adopted geospatial standards; Simple Features for SQL, WMS, WFS, GML, KML, InfraGML, CityGML to name just a few from the OGC. buildingSmart's IFC standard is supported by all major BIM design tools including the market leader Revit.

Perhaps most significantly there has been significant progress in developing common conceptual models for geospatial and AEC views of city infrastructure. The major breakthrough in bringing the architectural and geospatial views onto a common footing is the OGC LandInfra Conceptual Model developed by the OGC in cooperation with buildingSMART International and approved as an OGC standard in August, 2016. The LandInfra conceptual model was developed by Bentley Systems, Leica Geosystems, Trimble, Australian Government Department of Communications, Autodesk, Vianova Systems AS, and buildingSMART International and provides a unifying basis for land and civil engineering standards including the OGC's InfraGML and buildingSmart International's IFC for infrastructure standards.  InfraGML is the OGC's application schema supporting land development and civil engineering infrastructure facilities. InfraGML supports a subset of the existing LandXML standard. buildingSmart International's IFC-Alignment project uses this common conceptual model of alignments for roads, railways, tunnels and bridges. The objectives of the IFC-Alignment project is to enable the exchange of alignment information through the full infrastructure lifecycle from planning through design and construction to asset management.

Secondly, in the 1990s and the early 2000s there were few open source geospatial projects. The Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGEO) was only founded in 2006. Since then there has been rapid development of open source geospatial projects. There is enough open source geospatial code now that at the GEO|Design+BIM conference in Amsterdam, Sanghee Shin described a web-based geo-platform integrating massive, complex BIM models using open source geospatial libraries and tools including PostGIS, GeoServer, and Cesium and NASA WorldWind virtual globes. The importance of this project is that it shows that it is possible using the available open source geospatial APIs and libraries - together with some genuine innovative development - to create an open, non-proprietary, 3D geospatial platform for integrating geospatial and BIM. Given the critical importance of addressing the cultural and technical divide between the AEC and geospatial worlds, clearly many believe that a viable open source alternative will be essential for developing the innovative solutions to the challenge of interfacing the two worlds. 

Finally, major players in the AEC and geospatial industries, Autodesk and ESRI, have again agreed to collaborate. This time around they are probably more aware of the technical issues hindering BIM+geospatial integration. Both have adopted open standards when it made business sense - often under pressure from government clients - and both have also adopted open source technology where it made business sense. Together the combination of major players supporting the effort, standards organization like the OGC and buildingSmart already working to address the problem, and a broad range of open source code and a vibrant developer community may be enough to address the technical problems. If building and infrastructure owners and facilities managers including government as well as regulators become aware of the risk of not solving the problem, a solution may be found so that we will not be having the same BIM+geospatial integration discussion a quarter of a century from now.

Top construction company AECOM applies BIM + geospatial for full lifecycle projects

AECOM is a US$18.2 billion a year firm in the construction sector.  It designs and builds infrastructure around the world for public- and private-sector clients including transportation, facilities, environmental, energy, oil and gas, water, high-rise buildings and government.  For eight years running it has been ranked #1 in Engineering News Record‘s “Top 500 Design Firms”.  I was very happily surprised at Geospatial World Forum 2018 to hear John Kizior, Global Director, Project Technologies describe how AECOM uses BIM + GIS on design, build, finance and operate (DBFO) projects around the world.

A number of years ago, in a paper presented at a conference organised by Britain’s Association for Geographic Information (AGI), Ann Kemp, then head of GIS at Atkins Global, a design and engineering firm, asked the question ‘BIM isn’t geospatial -- or is it?’ and then argued that integration of geospatial and BIM was essential to address the challenges of the 21st century construction industry.  Kemp wasn’t the first one to speak about this. The need to integrate geospatial and BIM has been gaining traction for some time now and government mandated energy efficiency for buildings is a major driver of BIM/geospatial convergence.  A few firms such as Parsons Brinckerhoff, Atkins Global, and several Dutch firms including Arcadis and Royal BAM, in the construction sector have realized that BIM+geospatial integration provide greater value to projects that involve not just design and construction but also operations and maintenance.  A leader in this space, Rijkswaterstaat, the Dutch highway authority, began offering design-build-finance-maintain (DBFM) projects a number of years ago which has motivated private Dutch engineering and construction companies to adopt an integrated geospatial + BIM approach for construction projects.  For example, the firm Royal BAM Group nv/BAM Infraconsult adopted integrated BIM + geospatial because of market developments including more complex construction assignments and an increasing demand from customers for service provision throughout the entire life cycle of a project.  As further evidence that the importance of integrating BIM and GIS is gaining recognition on the construction sector, Autodesk and ESRI, 800 lb gorillas in their respective areas of BIM and GIS, have announced an agreement to collaborate to help bridge the gap between BIM and 3D GIS.

At Geospatial World Forum in Hyderabad, John Kizior described several projects where AECOM realized the value of integrated BIM + GIS.   John emphasized that the concept of using BIM and GIS together is not new, but one of the reasons it has been slow to be adopted in the construction industry is that it "requires a lot of effort" (John's words).  With the recent focus on geospatial and BIM at AECOM, the discussion has shifted from CAD/BIM alone to include geospatial and its capabilities specifically for design, build finance and operate (DBFO) projects.   This mirrors the Dutch experience with design, build, finance and maintain (DBFM) projects encouraged by the Dutch highway authority.  AECOM has found that by adding real world coordinates they increase the value and types of data for all stakeholders across the entire lifecycle.  Integrated geospatial + BIM connects data types together. BIM holds the utility content and GIS is a visual platform for maintenance linked to a maintenance workflow.  AECOM has applied this approach to the external campus of Denver International Airport, and to lease management at Orlando, Hong Kong, and South West Florida international airports.  For the West Kowloon Cultural District (WKCD) in Hong Kong AECOM developed and maintains a central repository with district-wide data from various sources including all operational data - architectural planning and engineering- for the district.  The advantage of an integrated BIM+GIS approach based on a centralized integration of information is that it allows the client to make strategic decisions during the design, build and operate phases of the construction lifecycle.