2D Record Drawings to Asset-Rich BIM Model in Autodesk Tandem

SCOTT HAKONSON: Hello, and welcome to our presentation on creating an asset-rich BIM model from 2D record drawings and point cloud data in Autodesk Tandem. First, I'd like to introduce myself, my co-presenter, the company we represent, and our client. Starting with me, my name is Scott Hakonson. I am Hazen and Sawyer as corporate BIM manager.

I work with our regional leads and other internal staff to ensure that we are all utilizing the correct BIM standards, workflows, and best practices. I am also responsible for training across the company and leveling workload, or trying to level workload as best we can. In addition, I work with both internal and external stakeholders to develop workflows with emerging technologies to bring Hazen and Sawyer's BIM capabilities to the next level and allow us to provide a more data-centric deliverable to our clients.

I have been in the AEC industry for over 20 years. 15 of those years have been utilizing BIM software. This will be my fifth time attending AU, and my first time as a presenter.

WILL MARINOS: My name is Will Marinos. I'm currently director of design technologies at Hazen and Sawyer. Our design technologies team manages, maintains, supports, trains the entire run of services internally for all of our Autodesk products, both Design Innovyse, now Unifi, VR, just everything Autodesk, as well as ESRI for all of our GIS products. So we handle all of those products.

I've been doing this in the AEC industry from Design through what I do now for 20-plus years. 15 of those, the last 15 of those, have been managing software and systems. And this is also my fifth time attending AU. This is my second time speaking.

SCOTT HAKONSON: So first, a little about the company that Will and I work for. Hazen and Sawyer is a-- excuse me. Hazen and Sawyer has been involved in all things water in the AEC industry since 1951. We have over 70 offices across the country, with over 1,700 professionals.

As I mentioned, Hazen and Sawyer is all things water. This includes stormwater, water resources, conveyance, CSO systems, water and wastewater treatment, as well as water reuse and bioenergy work. We also strive to be a forward-thinking company and utilize the latest advancements in software and technology to deliver the best quality product we can to our clients.

A little background on our client, Aurora Water. Aurora Water is one of the largest water producers in the Denver metro area. They have three water purification facilities, those being Wemlinger, Griswold, and Binney.

Like many municipalities, they manage assets across those three facilities and all their buried infrastructure. And one of the things that they wanted to do was develop a better way to manage their vertical assets. This is when they put out an RFP for that service and selected a small-ish filter gallery at their Wemlinger water purification facility.

A little background on the project. The goals of the project, as I mentioned, Aurora Water wanted to be able to track their vertical assets in an intuitive platform. The term "digital twin" is a bit overused in this day and age, but that is, in effect, what they wanted. They wanted to be able to utilize a digital twin to manage and view their vertical asset data.

Aurora Water at this point only had 2D record drawings of their facilities, most of those being CAD based. Again, they selected a filter gallery in their Wemlinger plant as a pilot. This is a proof of concept for their goals as a whole-- as an organization as a whole-- to get their assets into a platform where they can be viewed and manipulated in an intuitive way.

Hazen was responsible for the development of that digital twin and the implementation of asset data in that digital twin. And ultimately, we were also responsible for selecting a platform to deliver that content to the client. A little bit about the project. When Hazen and Sawyer was selected, we decided that we needed to develop BIM standards in content. The reason being, we needed to ensure that internally we could produce a consistent deliverable for our content for our client, and that required developing written BIM standards and a template.

After creating the standards, we went on to modeling the existing facilities from a combination of laser scans and record drawings. And then we created facilities, and we'll get more on that-- we'll have more information on that later. We created facilities in Autodesk Tandem, and then collected those facilities-- in other words, digital twins-- within Autodesk Tandem to Aurora Water's asset and O&M data. We then handed off the BIM model and the digital the digital facility model to Aurora Water.

As I mentioned, we started by producing BIM standards. The BIM standards were written in a way to provide enough direction to get Aurora Water a consistent deliverable, a consistent BIM deliverable. This is apart from drawing generation. These guidelines are exclusive to the production of a BIM-based digital twin.

In that light, we wrote the document to not restrict workflows, both for ourselves and for any other consultants that Aurora Water would work with. This allows them to have a consistent BIM model that they can use for their digital twin purposes without necessarily forcing consultants to work within a workflow they're not familiar with. We also created a template for this use that was developed along the same lines. It is relatively light on content. It only contains the content that is necessary to develop the digital twin that we were working on for Aurora Water.

Apart from the guidelines and the template, we developed a BIM execution plan for them because they didn't have one. Everybody should know the importance of a BIM ex, but this particular one focused on specifying that Aurora Water's BIM guidelines were to be used, the project was to be geolocated, and it also specified what platforms would be used for both Revit and the document management system on any given project. Next, we'll get on to the actual development of the model.

Laser scans were provided by a company called TruePoint. Hazen and Sawyer also employed TruePoint to develop the preliminary BIM model from the laser scan and record drawing data that they had collected. All Revit models were created and maintained in ACC. Reason being, ACC allowed TruePoint, Hazen and Sawyer, and Aurora Water to all view the same models in the cloud. All elements within the models were modeled to an LOD of 300. There's no need to get beyond that LOD for these purposes. Any other detail that was put into that would just make navigating the model more cumbersome. All assets within the model were modeled per raw water's asset hierarchy. And I'll get more on that on our next slide.

After TruePoint finished with their preliminary modeling of the facility, Hazen and Sawyer went through and verified model accuracy just to make sure that everything in there was accurate to the real-world conditions and to industry standards. Hazen and Sawyer also modeled additional components that were not captured by the laser scan and the subsequent conversion. The laser scanners could only scan what they had access to and what was visible within the plant without taking things offline. In this particular case, a wet well, pump wet well, was not accessible. And therefore, any equipment inside of that wet well was not captured in the laser scan and/or the subsequent model.

Hazen and Sawyer also geolocated the model. And by that, we mean that we set up shared coordinates based on the Colorado State Planning Coordinate System. I mentioned earlier that models were produced with Aurora Water's asset hierarchy in mind. Do you see the pump here on the left? That is actually-- typically, for a design model, that would be modeled as one object. In this particular case, there are two maintainable assets that are associated with that pump, one being the pump, the other being the motor. So we had to model those as separate objects.

All models are then published to ACC. It's important to note that they are published ACC because published models are what are visible through ACC to Autodesk Tandem. Next, we're on to Autodesk Tandem and how that really helped us bring the BIM to life.

First, a quick overview on Autodesk Tandem for those not familiar. Autodesk Tandem is a digital twin platform, Autodesk digital twin platform, that allows-- well, I guess the question that it would answer is, what does it provide to our client? One, it's an intuitive way to view a model. It allows non-Revit users to view and interact with BIM data.

It also provides better data management tools than are available within Revit. It further allows for the connection of outside data sources to a digital twin. And it connects the digital twin to real-world data. It also allows for the creation of powerful dashboarding tools, and we'll get onto those in our next slides.

So the first thing we need to do was connect our asset management data to the BIM digital twin we had created. That started by creating a facility view within Tandem by connecting the BIM model from ACC to Tandem. As I mentioned, only published models are visible to Tandem, not working models. An important thing for everybody to understand. We then exported data from the imported BIM facility, or BIM model, to Excel to manipulate the data and then bring back into Tandem. This allowed us to engage with Aurora Water's asset management team to populate and manipulate the data.

One of the great benefits of Tandem is the ability to create very customized views of facilities. The view you see here is a view of the filter gallery with all of the maintainable assets color coded by consequence of failure. And one of the great things is that it's not limited to just the traditional view that you'd see in many viewers here.

As I mentioned, all of the assets are color coded by consequence of failure. But what Tandem does is it allows you to group things by that consequence of failure. You can create views with all these set up. And what this actually brings to you is the ability to click on a maintainable asset within the model and see both the BIM data and the asset data that was added in Tandem. A very powerful view that really opens up the possibilities of a digital twin.

Another thing that we were able to do with the Tandem model was connect that to an external data source. In this case, O&M data. So again we created a view specifically for this purpose. You can see in this view that the motor of the vertical turbine pump is selected. And as you see, we again can see the relevant data of that motor, but we also were able to create an external link via HTML-- via the web-- to Aurora Water's SharePoint site, which contained all of their O&M data.

And if I click on that, I do indeed get access to their SharePoint site. But we don't have access to the data itself, so that's what we get. But it is a successful linking of a BIM object to the O&M data. With that, I'm going to hand it over to Will to present on our Autodesk Tandem workflows and next steps.

WILL MARINOS: Thank you, Scott. Get control of the clicker real quick. So yeah, I'm going to spend a little bit of time. We'll talk through-- touch a little bit more on the workflows that Scott mentioned, and I'll spend a little bit of time talking about what else we're doing with Tandem beyond the Aurora project.

OK, so as was mentioned, we utilize the Excel link between Tandem-- or the link between Tandem and Excel to manipulate the BIM data and add to it for Aurora. So the benefits, as Scott mentioned, is just that being able to take that BIM data into Tandem, and then from Tandem export to Excel, allows us to take the burden of managing manipulating and updating that data off of our designers. We can then engage our asset management team because they can do the work directly in Excel. And everyone's familiar with how easy and simplified it is to manipulate data in Excel.

On screen is a quick screenshot of the actual-- excuse me, Tandem ribbon within Excel, specifically linked to the Wemlinger project for Aurora. And again, that is how we went through and manipulated it and uploaded much of the secondary level of data, that O&M and everything else that was mentioned. And this is just an out-of-the-box feature of Tandem. This is nothing proprietary that we came up with. This is Autodesk's out-of-the-box setup.

Beyond the Excel piece, we also, for this project, utilize the built-in dashboarding feature of Tandem. This particular dashboard was asset classifications. So as we were going through and classifying all the assets, both internal project management staff and our client wanted to be able to track our progress.

So utilizing the built-in dashboarding features, we put this dashboard together so that as we were going through and staff on the project were going through and updating and classifying all the assets, at any point, both internal and the client staff could log into the Tandem site and actually track our progress. So dashboarding became a very, very helpful feature through all of this, and this is just one example of that. The dashboarding tools in Tandem are quite robust at this point.

So a little bit of what we're doing beyond the Aurora project. We are working through with another client, connecting their streaming devices, specifically their IoT streaming devices. So what we've got-- and again, this is a different model. But we've connected their IoT occupancy and temperature devices to this model. The green dots are those sensors.

Had selected one of them at the time we took the screenshot. You'll notice the occupancy hadn't been updated within the month of that screenshot, but temperature was 10 minutes prior. So I can't speak to how often the client has this data being pushed out of these sensors or what our connection to it is, just so much that we are working through the realistic use cases of connecting to the client's IoT sensors and how best we're going to use that data, aside from just viewing it in screen.

And to that point, as I mentioned, same client here. Temperature and occupancy sensors are what we connected to for all of this. This is a view of us combining that data into a heat map. So now we can track, or the client can track, the temperature data within their facility. And then, if something spikes one way or the other, and they know there's an issue it needs to be addressed, they can check the occupancy as well and see, if there is, how many people are in that area where the temperature spiked so they to get them out.

So we're just trying to look at what we can do with that data. We're still working through all of that. So far, the clients we're working with on that are very much appreciative and finding this helpful to their facility management goals. So with that, Scott and I would be happy to answer any questions. Thank you for watching.

You can email either of us. We'll get back to you as soon as we can. And we appreciate you taking the time.