BIM Automation: Generatively Designing Resilient Infrastructure with Revit

ADAM TANK: If you are here for the BIM automation, generatively designing resilient infrastructure with Revit class, you are in the right place. If not, I'm glad you're here. Maybe you'll stay, maybe you won't. But, in either case, we're going to have a ton of fun together. So let's go ahead and get started.

We are at an inflection point. There is a shift from manual tasks performed by humans to automated processes powered by machines that's transforming entire industries right now. And it's across all of them. No one is immune to this. If we think about healthcare with computer-led decision making, robotic surgeries, all the way to HR, where we have intelligent automated workflows, there is not a single person, a single job, that's being untouched by advances in automation.

Take a look at this picture of Wall Street from about 100 years ago. You see hundreds, if not thousands, of people screaming over one another, shouting with paper tickets, trying to make stock trades. If you now go to the floor, the trade floor, this is the view that you see. These humans that were once shouting are now behind the scenes, and the computers are now powering that trading. And in large-- in many cases, they're doing it somewhat automated.

Very similar situation if we look at hospitals. We used to have dozens of people in a room operating on one patient, some observing, some taking pictures, some learning. And now all you need is maybe two people in addition to a robot and automation, who are delivering better outcomes for the patient with far less effort, and energy, and time than we expended before.

One of my favorite videos showcasing the power of advances in technology is with F1 formula races. So I want you to take a gander at this video. I'll play it in its entirety. And then we'll talk about some of the differences that we see between the 1981 team and the 2019 team.

[VIDEO PLAYBACK]

[CAR SOUNDS]

[END PLAYBACK]

It is almost laughable how different these two teams are. The 1981 team clearly was struggling to get their car back in the race, where the 2019 team, with advances in technology and probably some extra skill from the team members, were able to get their car back into the race in mere seconds.

If we translate this to what's happening in the engineering industry, you look back in the 1980s, you probably would have seen a room that looks similar to this one. Dozens, if not hundreds, of people hovering over drafting tables, creating designs using pen and paper. Of course, there's been advances in technology and, to some degree, automation.

But my question is, are we really the Formula One team of the future? Have we truly embraced automation and generative design when it comes to engineering of critical infrastructure? I believe that the AEC and EPC world will be transformed by radical advances in BIM automation and specifically with generative design, which is what we're going to be talking about today.

But I want to pose the question, why will this happen, and why is it so important? I'll call your attention to a really interesting article that was published in Palo Alto online in August 22 of this year, 2023. Palo Alto is eager to expand the footprint of their wastewater treatment plant. They know they have to make it a bit bigger in order to handle more volumes of wastewater and some other future scenarios.

But the challenge they have is that it's unbelievably cramped in Palo Alto and real estate is unbelievably expensive. So if you look at this graphic, the city is trying to piece together, do we buy more acres to the south? Do we pass a new measure to buy land to the east? Do we maybe use the existing site footprint better in a way that we don't have to buy more real estate?

Ultimately, the utility leaders and the public works directors are scratching their heads because nobody has a crystal ball. Nobody can predict what they need to do in order to figure out where they should put the next upgrade, especially when they're space-constrained and when new regulations for wastewater are literally coming down the pipe.

Karen North, their assistant public works director, says that, "I view this as an opportunity to future-proof our facility for hopefully 50 years." In other words, she wants to be able to evaluate options as early on in this process as possible to create a more resilient facility given the constraints of today but also the constraints 50 years from now.

The challenge with that is that the way that we do design in this industry is incredibly manual, cumbersome, and oftentimes repetitive. And we certainly see that happening in the civil and architectural space.

So if Karen is to kick off this project to see what options she has available to her, she's going to launch this project, and then an engineering firm will start with their process engineering team to look at the process of treating wastewater. They'll do their work and hand that to the mechanical team, who then will hand that to their controls and instrumentation team, who then hand that to their civil and architectural team, who finally then submit it to the client.

Karen will review, and she'll probably say, you know what? There might be some other things we should consider here. Can you maybe look at a new scenario in regards to potential rainfall? Can you look at a new scenario in regards to population growth? And this process starts all the way back at the process engineering team.

There are some advances in technology that these firms are using today. Designs may be completed manually in AutoCAD. And there's an occasional use of Revit families to help speed up this process. Independent of those though, this process still takes hundreds or thousands of hours with human touch in every one of these engineering disciplines. And if someone like Karen needs a change, it sometimes requires complete revisions of all of the design work that the engineering firms had done.

What if there was a better way? What if we could use advances in automation, and specifically generative design in Revit, to give Karen the options that she's looking for early on in this process, so she can ultimately build the most resilient wastewater plant of the future?

There is. And that's what I want to show you, is that these tools are being used today on real-world projects to help utilities deliver more resilient, more sustainable, and more innovative critical infrastructure very, very early on in the processes. So let's look at the case of a US water utility that were in a very similar situation to Karen, looking at their options to upgrade an existing 24 million gallon-a-day wastewater treatment plant.

What they wanted to do was have the engineering consultants look at three scenarios. What will the future effluent requirements be? In other words, how stringent do we need to treat this wastewater? What if the population increases based on our growth patterns and potentially other businesses moving in? And what is to happen if we have historic floods, like North Texas has recently been having, what impact does that have on our treatment plant, not only today, but 20, 30, 50 even 100 years from now?

But, of course, to do this manually, as we just discussed, it takes an unbelievable amount of budget and time that neither the asset owner nor the engineering firm has. If we think about why this is so impossible to do, and why we don't have the time and budget to do it, this utility was particularly interested in a couple of different use cases.

In this example, they wanted to see multiple wastewater treatment technologies. They wanted to see scenarios for upgrading for future effluent requirements. They had to meet new more stringent phosphorus limits in the wastewater. And they knew that they would have varying population growth models.

And maybe most interestingly, when it comes to resiliency, they wanted to ensure the facility would be able to address the impacts of climate change, such as more volatile weather patterns and the increased frequency and intensity of extreme weather events. This screams resiliency. And it screams opportunity to use new advances in technologies.

In fact, as part of this master plan update, they requested the engineering consultants to provide 10x the number of scenarios. In other words, they started with those three and then they then asked for 30 scenarios to be evaluated. I'll show you the text here, and I'll give you about 30 seconds to read this, and then we'll talk about it.

If you're an engineering consultant, your job probably has hit the floor. You would never be expected to do this traditionally using manual design methods because it simply wouldn't be possible. This work is typically left for conceptual design or detailed design phase and certainly not in the submission stage.

There are a couple of things that stood out to me. One was that 30 conceptual design scenario. Another one was that they wanted the engineering firms to use conceptual design software that automated a number of these engineering discipline calculations, including the generation of a 3D BIM model, producing the editable outputs, the native files, in both Autodesk AutoCAD and Autodesk Revit.

So you might be wondering the question, why 30 options? Well, we talk about resiliency and we talk about wanting to be able to deliver better outcomes to these asset owners. In the case of the Texas wastewater treatment plant, they had the three scenarios that they wanted evaluated.

But it's not just those three scenarios that we might want to evaluate to create a future-proof wastewater treatment plant. We may also want to look at different variations of each of these options. So on the technology side, we have not only the way you treat the wastewater but maybe how the wastewater treatment plant is operated.

And, of course, the site footprint, just like in Palo Alto, you want to see, what if we put our new assets here? What if we use our existing treatment assets? What if we can't buy the land? And what if we need to repurpose or we need to demolish and build new? Same thing with temperature and same thing with the wastewater.

And you even branch out further from there. So it's not just three individual options, it's a permutation of all of these together. Because every time you change one, you have to do those calculations all over again, which, again, simply wouldn't be possible using existing traditional design methods.

So how does this actually work? What does it mean to automate BIM modeling? What does it mean to generatively design wastewater treatment plants and critical infrastructure? What we see here is software in the cloud actually instructing Revit to arrange rooms inside of buildings on its own.

So this is not a human designer who's laying out these blueprints, this is the computer actually saying, based on the constraints you've given me, here's where I think these new assets should go. Here's how big they should be. And here's how those assets should, in fact, perform. You can see us manipulating that 3D view right now. Of course, this doesn't look like a Revit file, but it very will soon.

Once you have these buildings and you know how big they are, software now can actually manipulate these buildings and arrange them on a site. So, historically, engineers would take cut-out pieces of paper and move them manually on a blueprint. And now, software is doing that effectively automated.

Once you have that, once you have the buildings laid out on site, you know where they're going to be, you can actually instruct Revit to create the full 3D BIM model with all of the associated elements. So, in this case, the concrete volumes, the quantities, the thicknesses, fill volumes, takeoffs, everything that we know and love about Revit, you have all that data available to you.

And, of course, now that we have the BIM model, we can also take that data and translate it into documents, like a civil boq or a [INAUDIBLE] unbelievably helpful when you're costing these projects early on and you're evaluating this range of scenarios as early as the submission phase for these projects.

So if we took a look at what happened with this particular treatment plant, the bottom half of the screen where all of these assets are is the existing treatment works. They didn't want to touch this. The wastewater utility didn't want to touch these. And they wanted to use this-- we'll call it whitespace at the top-- to see what new assets do we need and what space will they occupy?

So the software that we used generatively designed the new assets. And it did it all in Revit. So here we have the floor plan or the site footprint. And we had told the software the constraints around the existing assets. And by pressing go and just a couple hours later, the software generatively designed all the new assets required, their sizes, their shapes, and then laid them out on the site.

So if we look at what that looks like from a BIM point of view, we now have the existing assets to the bottom half of the screen in gray. And we have the new assets on top. And, of course, once you have this BIM model, you can do some really cool visualization work.

So, in this case, we've taken the 3D BIM model in Revit. We've overlaid it on a site marking. And now the utilities have a much better view of exactly what this treatment plant will look like in 50 years. And you've been able to evaluate a full range of potential scenarios as part of the project.

So if we think about that previous process, where we had the project launched all the way through to submission to the client, the multiple iterations, all of the engineering handoffs, we now have a much more streamlined process where we have the software doing the conceptual design work utilizing Revit, the outputs are then taken-- dozens of outputs are taken and handed to the client after buy-in from project partners.

And you ultimately are able to evaluate a much wider range of scenarios, much wider range of resiliency, and you save a ton of time and energy. So we combine multiple decisions from engineering fields. We explore a wider range of scenarios. And, ultimately, the owner is much better off, building the plant that they know they need to last for decades and decades into the future.

At the end of this process, many of the firms that bid on this work did include conceptual designs in its bid package which, again, is typically not possible using manual methods. The winning EPC firm collaborated to produce these 30 or more alternatives.

And, now, the utility is using similar techniques on other master-planning updates. So we've seen the success of generative design and Revit that provides the outcome that utilities are looking for.

In this case, though, we only barely scratched the surface. As we talked about, the utility wanted to evaluate these three to 30 scenarios. But we still have so many more possibilities available to us, which is exciting. It's the options for us to look at what resiliency truly means in the case of wastewater treatment planning.

Let's take that crystal ball concept and give these utilities the resilience that they need in order to build the infrastructure that our humanity, that our country, that the world needs to thrive. We can go from this limited set of design options and potential scenarios for evaluation-- in the case of the Texas treatment plant, those three-- and we can do upwards of 30 or even more.

The only constraint on our ability to assess and design the resilient infrastructure we need is going to be from the imagination of the engineer, not the technology, not the time, and not the budget.

How do we know this works? Our firm, Transcend, and the users of our tools, have designed over 15,000 of these types of infrastructure to date. And what's interesting is that we work across multiple customer segments, not just the engineering consultants and the asset owners, so folks like BRK Ambiental in Brazil, or Scottish Water in the UK, Black & Veatch in the States, Stanley Consultants in the States.

But we also work with the technology suppliers that bring this equipment into these projects to also provide resiliency and more innovation. So we enable all the ecosystem players to think holistically about what resiliency means in order to come up with the best potential outcome in the planning process.

We not only do this in water and wastewater treatment plants, as you've seen today, but we also work in the power industry, where we automate the design of electrical substations using a very similar process in our generative design platform.

And, finally, there are over a hundred of us working to build the tools of the future that our engineers need in order to design these resilient infrastructures. And we have our own set of talented and unbelievably passionate engineers and computer programmers that sit side by side to ensure that this platform delivers real, secure, trusted data, so that these asset owners can make the best decisions for themselves.

We work internationally, US and Hungary and, of course, have also had a wide range of experiences in multiple different sizes of companies, not just our little startup.

So help me usher in this era of automation into the engineering design industry. We cannot possibly do all of this work manually. Automation is the key to resilient infrastructure. And with your help, I am confident that we can bring in a new era of resiliency and sustainability. Thank you.