AEC Futures Briefing: MEP

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STEVE BUTLER: We're going to kick things off for this MEP Futures briefing session. Hopefully that's what you were expecting. And this year, we're going to do things a little bit differently. We're going to bring up this veritable array of speakers to present on the different MEP topics from design all the way through to construction. So you'll see some of the usual suspects if you've been here before in previous years.

But we also thought it'd be great for you to see some new characters. So we've asked some of our product owners to present on their respective aspects of MEP. The agenda, this is how we're going to run things this morning. I'm not going to read through all this, but suffice to say we're going to cover our product strategy, then get into the disciplines from a design perspective and then fabrication.

And I'm not going to read this out either. However, you can. I'm sure you've seen it many, many times. Suffice to say, please don't make any purchasing decisions based on anything we say or you hear today. OK, so when we're thinking about our strategy around MEP, and in fact this applies to all the disciplines, we have to look at the industry and talk to you guys around the world and understand what's happening around the world?

What's driving our industry? What emerging trends are we seeing? Because those trends are emerging for a reason. They're emerging because of climate emergency. They're emerging because we're having problems with supply chain. Many, many other problems. And when I talk to executives, these are the things that they say most often. And I'm sure you have heard them too.

So we have lots of changing regulatory compliance for lots of reasons, but certainly to try and meet some of our energy goals. And that's meaning we have to use more analysis tools, more technology to be able to ensure we can meet those standards. So we're seeing more and more engineers moving to our technology or moving to BIM-based workflows.

The second one is related to that carbon and understanding embodied carbon, operational carbon on our projects. But the other thing that's hugely important is that we rightsize our systems because overperforming systems lead to all issues, which you know better than I do. We're also seeing a big shift towards modular prefabrication, industrialized construction and DfMA, Design for Manufacturing and Assembly.

And of course, the MEPs are leading that. And a lot of the fabrication stuff we have is helping to enable some of that offsite. And then finally, building electrification. Again, it's top of most people's agenda and we need to go faster. In fact, we need to go 4% faster every year than we already are.

So these things feed into why we start to invest, where we do in our products, to respond as well as I said to some of the challenges that you're facing around things like the pace of moving to digitalization, the challenges of moving to digitalization at supply chain and labor.

So our strategy from a business or go-to-market perspective looks a little bit like this. So you'll hear us talk about project delivery or digital delivery a lot at AU. So I'm not going to talk to it. Suffice to say, Docs and the common data environment is hugely important, especially around that topic of AEC data and granular data, which you would have heard Nicola talk about yesterday.

And of course, for those of you in the relevant countries support for ISO 19650. The bit in the middle is really where we're going to focus today and not so much on the right, mostly in the middle where we talk about what we're doing around integrated BIM-based model-based analysis, fabrication, and of course, how that ultimately leads to smarter buildings.

The other thing I did just want to point out before we kick off with our product management team, our product owners, is that from an MEP point of view, our partners are hugely important. They feel critical gaps, they extend workflows and we take a lot of time to choose who those partners should be. And we have some of them in the room today.

So those that we work with most closely are the likes of GTP and Stratus, which you all know very well, particularly in the US. On the fabrication and pre-con side, Trane, we have a new partnership with Trane which we're excited to talk about, but not today. And then we have others throughout Europe and the rest of the world.

So that's really why you'll hear us talk a lot about partners. Very, very important to the whole workflow. So with that being said, let me kick things off by handing it over to Ian who will talk about our product strategy.

IAN MOLLOY: No, not yet? Hello, Hello. There we go. All right. So morning, everybody. My name is Ian Molloy. I am the senior product line manager for MEP overall. So I look after the overall strategy for MEP. So that's what I'm going to talk about. When we talk about a strategy, it's important to understand what we mean by that. Is that it's really about not just what we're working on, but really the why we're working on these things.

I'm going to describe that. And that should set the level for introducing other members of the team to get into the details of what we're working on. Now before we get into the details of those things, it's just worth pointing out this resource. We have a Public Roadmap which has been available for a number of years now. If you follow the QR code, you'll find the Public Roadmap for architecture structure, MEP.

And within MEP you'll see it's organized by design stage and then also by what our overall strategy is, what we're currently working on, what's next and what's on our radar. Now, not everything that we're working on is on this roadmap. But what's great about this is it'll give you a little bit of insight and you can also provide some comments on anything that you like you don't like, you want to learn more about, just let us know.

Now as we go through this presentation, just note the little progress bar down at the bottom. This will talk a little bit about what we've recently released because some people aren't aware of those things. And then we'll also talk about what's coming next and what's on our radar. So it'll just give you a little bit of context of where we're at.

So a strategy needs an overall purpose or a mission. And ours has been pretty consistent for quite a few years now. I won't read it out because it's been the same for a few years. But the key word in here is about integrating. Integrating everything from design analysis through to documentation, detailing and fabrication. And what we mean by integrating is really connecting and optimizing.

We know that there's a huge amount of potential still for improved efficiency in the workflow, as well as improving the quality of the end product, the ultimate building, how well it performs, how easy it is to maintain, cost effectiveness and things like that. There's still a ton of potential to improve these things. And so there at the very highest level, this is the thing that really, really drives us.

And this is also pretty consistent, but we're articulating it here for the first time. And that's what our principles are. When we make decisions to do one thing or the other, what are the different things that we're working on that guide us? And so the first thing is to balance and connect customer needs across mechanical, electrical, design to fabrication.

Now we can't keep everybody happy, but we do our best within the major personas and design stages and deliverables that people use our tools for. We try to make sure that we're investing and maintaining in each of these major areas. And both serving them directly, but then also critically looking for opportunities where they can improve the handoff upstream and downstream between one another.

So that's really about the flow of data from design through to construction. Working towards a better future while maintaining established features and functionality. This is a really tricky balance to make. And again, wherever there's low hanging fruit and quick fixes that we can make for popular items, we'll do that.

But generally, we try to wait towards a better future because again there's just a huge amount of potential to increase the efficiency of the overall workflow. And that's a major thing that drives us.

And then finally, we shape solutions so that they're more consistent with industry standards and best practices. There are several examples inside of Revit MEP, where the Revit's internal mental model of things is just not entirely consistent with how engineers define things or how they think about things or how systems work.

And so we're always looking for gaps in those models or inconsistencies in those models or duplication of things and really try and make Revit work the way systems actually work. So just as our overall mission and vision has been consistent, so has the way we define all of the different personas and stages that we serve. And if you've heard us do a Futures briefing before in the past, you've seen this picture many, many times and it provides a constant.

Just to redescribe it quickly. At a very high-level, there are two major fundamentally different disciplines, mechanical and electrical. On one end of the spectrum we've got design consultants and on the other end of the spectrum we've got trade contractors. And across that spectrum you see different really key stages, activities, and deliverables that connect that whole process from design analysis through to coordination and documentation and detailing and fabrication.

Depending on who you are and how you work and the stakeholders that you work with, you'll do different amounts of each of these. And so again, our goal is going back to balancing and connecting and moving to the future and maintaining existing. These are the pieces that we're investing in and trying to really create a seamless workflow between one another.

So our overall objectives, we can summarize them as in five parts. On the analysis side, we can see that for both mechanical and electrical, we're really trying to improve Revit's ability to capture design intent so that you can manage and structure the information in the model downstream.

We're also trying to include the data model and the logic that supports a much wider variety of mechanical systems and electrical systems. There's also a lot of inflexible frameworks in Revit in terms of how these things are defined. And we're trying to open these things up and make them more open, make them more extensible.

The coordination and documentation piece is really the connective tissue between those early stages and those late stages, where we've got all opportunities to connect to analytical, to physical, to harmonize the way design and fabrication parts work. And really, our long-term goal here is really laying the foundations for a more structured data and a greater, easier automation downstream and even in the future, machine learning.

And then on the detail and fabrication side, there's really two parts to that. One is about sharing, making it easier to share content, settings and standards with not only just for our detailing and fabrication customers, but for anyone who can take advantage. We're seeing more and more designers start to take advantage of the fabrication parts, even in a design context.

And then the other critical part of this as Steve mentioned, particularly with partners, is that we are really focused on the modeling, the detailing, and the content management.

But we're really looking to partners, both internal at Autodesk and external partners like Stratus with GTP, eVolve and others, so that they can provide, really, there's a huge opportunity for developing a lot of innovative new approaches to estimating and detailing and particularly fabrication.

So I'm not going to go through these in detail. You're going to hear more from the product team. But I'm just going to talk about sustainability and carbon in particular in a minute before I hand over. Then you're going to hear about the rest of this. But this is a high-level summary of our overall investment priorities.

So let's talk about sustainability and carbon. This is not an MEP specific thing. This is a very cross-disciplinary need. But MEP plays a huge role particularly on operational carbon, but also in the embodied carbon of all your equipment and systems that go into the building. So the big news on this is that after a very long time in tech preview and developing, we released the next generation of Autodesk Insight alongside Revit 2025.

So this is now available in full production. It's available as far back as Revit 2023.1. And the really key thing about this is that it provides a simple open, extensible workspace for analyzing total carbon. So that's both embodied and operational carbon from the very earliest stages of design through to detailed design.

It starts with a Revit analytical model and it provides carbon analysis using data from building transparencies, EC3, and energy simulation using EnergyPlus and OpenStudio. It's worth pointing out that we call it next generation insight, not just to sound cool, but to actually differentiate it from the original insight, which is still available and will continue to be available for some time until we cover all the bases with the functionality that it provides.

And we're continuing to work on it. As we go into the future, we are going to end up with just a single insight. And the big parts that we're working on to bring us to feature and value parity with original insight, and to really make it much more applicable to MEP on the operational side is, the first piece is what we call complex or simulation factors.

And so this is effectively the ability to control any input to the energy simulation in a parametric way using the Insight interface. So it means that you can create all different custom dashboards, analyzing different things like HVAC system sizing factors and coefficients of performance and things like that. Whatever inputs you would like to vary, you can do that very easily through a dashboard. It doesn't require a high-level of expertise to do that.

The other big thing is that insights currently are stored on a per user basis. So in the future they will be part of the project and we'll enable sharing through ACC. In other words, we're not going to develop our own sharing capability purely for Insight. We're going to effectively put Insight on Docs and enable the sharing in that way. So it'll enable insights per project instead of per user.

And then perhaps the biggest one again very relevant to MEP, particularly at the more detailed stages and for fabrication, is expanding Insight's scope or access to the scope of data that it can analyze. Right now it uses this energy analytical model, which is essentially 80% of the main architectural elements in the building. But it doesn't include things like ductwork, pipework, columns, or beams and things like that.

And really, the way we plan to tackle that is effectively connect Insight to the AEC Data Model. You'll have heard a lot about that during your time at Autodesk University, so hopefully you can connect the dots as to what that means.

But effectively, what it will mean is that you'll be able to use Insight from very early stages all the way through to very, very detailed stages when you have a detailed MEP model and you'd like to use that for more detailed carbon analysis. So with that, I'm going to hand it over to Tetsuya.

TETSUYA HISHIDA: OK, hi, everyone. Some of you might not know me. I'm Tetsuya Hishida. I used to be a mechanical engineer. And today I'd like to walk you through those advancements we've been making for mechanical design. So the work we've been doing as I recap, I'm going to show you what we've been shipping in Revit 2025, flow and design, fabrication duct pipe elements.

So we were focusing more on flow and pressure drop calculations. These were reports outside of Revit, but we put it in. So this analytical segment, it's a category we added. It allows you to deep dive into those flow and pressure drop characteristics. You'll be able to use schedules tags to directly access those key characteristics. And this is in preview release today. So you can already try it, but we've added another capability to override the loss coefficient.

Sometimes those loss coefficients are different among industry. And we are also providing a Dynamo example to target some of the industries. There will be small tweaks such as new parameter called flow characteristic. Analytical segments are in this case diverge, branch or main or straight. These are the smaller things in the family. So you'll be able to tweak in and know which part you are dealing with.

And after we went through these flow and pressure characteristics, we did some workshops to identify where we're going to focus next. HVAC zoning had unnecessary parameter and even though there's Insight or new tools, people were not sure which information is going to be passed to those cascaded services.

Ironically, even though we had duplicate information, there weren't enough and users were struggling using it in real world projects. Creation of energy analytical model was an error prone process. Users were scratching their head to make their model even to the simulation phase. And there were some impediments adopting EnergyPlus.

In order to address these issues, we are partnering with strong collaborators. First, we are partnering with Finisher Pro. They know a lot about this energy analytical model creation. So we are making this quick start dialog to guide through those steps to make this energy analytical model. Next, we are partnering with PSD. They will be the partner for us to deep dive into those real world scenario.

I've done a class also with PSD today and there is going to be an ad-on that would allow you to override key characteristics such as COP or pump performance, or those small, small things you would want to tweak. And of course, we're working with NREL. We have a biweekly meeting with them and working with real customer, pointing out some of the issues they want to solve.

So as a total, we're doing this foundational work together. And on top of this, we are focusing on a more clear, logical and efficient HVAC workflow with zoning. I'll show you what it looks like.

So this is going to be in the preview release. And we have two concepts for zoning in this existing Revit. We have HVAC zone and system zone. But we're trying to empower the system zone, which is the one connected to the cascading services such as insights.

So it will make it much clear for you to jump in and make zoning. This system zone now has the ability to choose your space and assign it to zones. And also, I actually faced this when I was in the mechanical engineering field. But there are too many changes on the architectural side and you want to just focus on your work.

So you can convert a space-based zone to a sketch so that it is detached from the model. But know all the important information such as area or volume. And also we're following the Revit paradigm to have types and type property. So you will be able to utilize those existing templates or whatever among and within the project.

This is going to be a big future, but I'll show you the prototype we're now tweaking again. It might be a boon for architects, but John would also work with rooms. And it's not only for architects. We know that engineers struggle to get the exact same area value in some cases because it might be wall center or whatever the architects would choose.

So it will allow a more work in tandem with architects so that you don't have to worry about those small details. Also, this room or space can be part of multiple zones. It's not only HVAC that we're focusing on. There might be fire rating or there might be service hot water. Whatever zone that you would want is now going to be a type of that zone. So you will be able to assign it to each of those spaces or rooms.

And lastly, there is actually an existing Revit feature, but there is a schedule called embedded schedule. I know you might not know this part, but it allows you to schedule what's inside the element. It's not only for its own, but in this case, you'll be able to know what space is inside the zone with those characteristics. And you'll be able to tag it and you'll be able to schedule it.

This is the last slide for me. If you see the right-hand side of this slide, this is the work we've been doing around network or flow pressure characteristic. I know you do these more in the earlier phase, but we're trying to have a cohesive design data into the fabrication phase.

And on the left-hand side, you will see these work we're doing with the analytical side. So we're enriching the Revit model with various type of zones. It will support multiple topologies. And you'll be able to use these zones to put your design into Revit. And on the bottom, we're working on renewing the system browser.

System browser from its name, it's just a browser and sometimes you can edit it. There were also some confusion, but system browser can be potentially somewhere you put those design intent from the earlier phase.

Maybe there might be progress bar or pie chart or whatever, that shows you how much you have drawn in the real model. So it's going to be a key component to connect the analytical side to so to say, the latter side. With that, I'd like to pass it to Zhengrong.

ZHENGRONG FU: Taking a moment. All right. Yeah, thank you so much and thanks Tetsuya. This is Zhengrong Fu, I'm the product owner working with an electrical team, mainly focusing on electrical workflow in Revit. And very excited to be here to update you with the latest progress we have made in electrical analysis within Revit and also what's on the horizon.

And I'd like to start with these three electrical objectives we are trying to do, trying to improve our electrical design within Revit. Starting with the domain model. So we are going to build a better global relevant domain model within Revit, mainly because there are some limitation in Revit now. If you're familiar with wires or those cables within Revit, it's mainly AEC code.

And also the cable tray and conduit, these things that don't know the conductors within it. And you're going to tagging them and analyzing the way those things are not going to happen. And talking about the distribution gear, this equipment definition in Revit is very basic. Doesn't know the quantity of the buses or transformers within it.

And the circuit arrangement, the current circuit is just defined as a collection of elements fed from a single point, but it's lacking of the branching or how you control the things within that circuit. So a lot of things we need to redefine the whole screen domain model, make sure it's a global-relevant, help you to enable other features.

And then with this domain model and people are mainly asking for design continuity between different design stages or with other engineers like mechanical engineers. We have enabled those analytical design data in living the Revit model. Now more and more people are asking how we can move it forward, how we can connect these analytical loads with real panels or models by using the schematics or the analysis result?

And eventually furthermore, you want to work with the mechanical engineer better to get their equipment, get their loads to combine into your design. So that's the design continuity I'm talking here. And eventually, the integrated computations is about we provide you better load calculation, all sorts of things so that it can empower you to make better decisions. So these are three key objectives we are focusing on.

And with this objective in mind and you can imagine that you can start your design, capture all your design data within Revit since day one. And you can assess your load requirement. You can plan your key distribution component using those analytical elements.

And then as the project progresses, use the analysis result and the schematics to guide your model all the details and ensure you have your design intent well captured, well preserved throughout the whole design lifecycle. And like I said, a better domain model is required to capture all those essential data and enable the seamless connection between the analytical components, the conceptual design with the physical modeling.

And I also mentioned, you need some integrated computed computation so that you can have a better design experience within Revit. So how to achieve this ideal workflow? So we have implemented this electrical analysis workflow since Revit 23. And then get it enhanced in the coming two releases. From this short demo you can tell, you can now sketch over a floor plan to capture your load requirement.

And you also can create an analytical buses and transformers to represent your high-level design. And all these things are actually a very important part for your single line or schematics. And we also improve the calculation core so that you can get a better demand load calculation and kinetic currents, even with some single phase transformers or unbalanced three-phase situations.

So for more details, if you want to learn how to use it or the details, you see there are two QR code on there. One is from the class Andrew and [INAUDIBLE] just delivered it at this AU, probably some of you guys happen to be there. And you also want to check the class feature demo from Martin and myself from our last AU.

And all this you will find lots of detail how to start it. And I mentioned a lot about the analytical components like buses, transformers, and loads. However, we are still missing the analytical features mainly because the reason I mentioned the conductors are actually hard coded to anything now.

So to address this issue, we have initiated an effort to globalize the electrical connectors. So if you check out our open Public Roadmap, you may have noticed it's called the globalized electrical conductors. Meaning, we want to make sure the right data is captured in Revit. From this new settings dialog, you can tell now that not only imperial sizes but also metric are supported.

You can define all conductors, cables, either it's a single core and multi-core three-phase with a neutral or single phase without ground, all cases. And you have more flexibility to specify the sizes on the circuit. It's not a hard coded anymore.

And it's also supported, control circuit, the other type of data circuits, not only power. With this improvement, it actually like I said, put the right data in place and enable us to eventually provide a better data for the single line diagram or even model 3D cable or busbar, which I have been asked a lot.

And by the way, all these things have been in our preview release. If you have access, please help us to test it, play with it and let us know your feedback. And then I'd like to conclude my part, mainly introduce some items on our roadmap. You have learned these three objectives we are focusing on.

For the first one, mainly domain models, we are going to introduce the analytical features to ensure all relevant data for a single line diagram is available. And we are going to support model and the scheduling cables, sparse bars provide you better association between these containment and conductors. And in the second group, we are exploring how we can connect the physical modeling with the analytical elements I just introduced.

For example, put some analytical load into a panel schedule or using your singular diagram to guide your modeling and eventually provide you the right schedule like figure 1 and equivalent connection schedule that you need to use. And the last group is mainly how we open more calculation capability to enable third party developer to override the calculation we have in Revit.

Develop the calculator follow your local standard. Give you more transparency through the report telling you how we're calculating and eventually provide you a better integrated experience. That's all for my part. And I'm going to hand over to Martin Schmid, our product manager talking about the fabrication strategy.

MARTIN SCHMID: Thank you, Zhengrong. All right. So as you said, my name is Martin Schmid. I'll be covering our high-level fabrication strategy. So the first one is, again, similar to how Ian presented the high-level principles, we'll start with our fabrication principles. The first one is more, move of the fabrication business logic into our cloud connected infrastructure.

So you see this, it's been a theme throughout AU move to cloud connected data cloud connected services. And there's a few different reasons for this and what we mean by doing this for everyone. First as Ian alluded to, we see a lot of requests in Revit for more detailed piping. Most of those requests are already fulfilled in what are the fabrication elements.

And so we're doing the updates to the MEP content and to provide a new modern way of managing that information and making it more accessible to more users. We also see around the world, different team structures.

So Ian had a slide up there about design build versus design bid build. But when you look globally, there's a lot of different structures of teams, a lot of different places where that responsibility for different levels of detail lives and resides. And so to make this again more accessible to more types of users, move it into a more modern way of working with it.

In addition, the other side of for everyone piece is there's some really good concepts in the fabrication database. Two of those that I'll call out are ancillaries, which allows you to keep track of elements like nuts, bolts, washers, something that was on Ian's slide about the carbon footprint, of keeping track of all those things. It's not an MEP specific thing.

Those things would be beneficial to architects, structural engineers, so on and so forth. And the other key thing in the fabrication database that's unique is keeping track of cost and labor information. Again, something we want to generalize across the platform to make that type of workflow available to everybody.

The next one on here is leveraging the existing customer knowledge to inform improvements in quality and productivity. So again, we're not mechanical contractors. We're not sheet metal workers. We're not detailers. We need your feedback constantly to understand where the challenges, where the pain points are, and where the gaps.

And we also are looking generally across, certainly looking at improvements that we can make for individual users, but also as Ian alluded to across the entire workflow. In fact, at AU this week we saw a customer presenting.

They were a mechanical design or MEP design firm, working very closely with a contractor to learn more about constructability so that instead of the workflow that's very common today, building a design model that gets thrown over the wall and thrown away, and then the mechanical contractor or electrical contractor rebuilding something, they're working collaboratively together to build something once, deliver it once more productive, eliminating waste in the process.

And then the last one on here is looking for new innovative ways of working. So Steve had mentioned Stratus, which provides a very innovative way of using that model data to inform workflows into the shop and into the field and managing that information.

And we believe by moving more of this data into the cloud and connected experiences, that there's opportunities for really revolutionize the way that projects are estimated and also how the data flows in from the design into the manufacturing processes.

So until we realize that broad vision of next generation estimating, next generation of manufacturing, we continue to maintain CAD/CAM and as these products continue to be available that are the workhorses of many of our mechanical contractors.

But what we're doing with them is primarily around maintaining AutoCAD compatibility, making sure that year over year that they're still available, ensuring that all the components that are shared across the Autodesk ecosystem are updated in these products as well.

And then lastly, from the standpoint of where we focus on any improvements, bug fixes and those sorts of things, looking at where there are opportunities, that is this something that is preventing use of the next version, or is it something that feeds into the broader workflow? Is it common as well as impacting Revit as well as impacting our initiatives in the cloud? So those are how we prioritize to make sure that we're making the best value across the ecosystem.

So that feeds into this notion of strengthening the MEP fabrication core. And what we mean by the MEP fabrication core is all the business logic, all the code that really drives historically CAD, CAM, and EST and also drives the fabrication components within Revit as well.

The key area where there's a lot of challenges is what are called the flat pattern development. So because this is connected to the ductwork manufacturing process, we have a lot of issues in our backlog around issues that come up when converting that 3D geometry ductwork fitting into what's called a flat pattern development.

So anytime there's an issue that it requires manual intervention, if that is overlooked, then it's a manual process to fix that in the shop results in potential waste of material, waste of time. And so that's why we're prioritizing our fixes at that core level around that area of functionality.

In addition as we're doing this, there's challenges in different parts working different ways. The same data inputs might result in different data outputs on different fittings and so forth. And so as we're doing this renovation if you will, is we're trying to make things far more consistent so that the the same inputs result in the same outputs on different fittings.

And that leads to ultimately to better code health because it allows not only you to maintain and build your content, make it easier, make it easier to understand how it works, easier to learn and adopt, but it also helps from the standpoint of maintaining that code. And when we want to make improvements that it's easier to do it across the board.

Then we get into Revit detailing and data. So when we look at the detailing capabilities within Revit primarily, particularly on the ductwork side, and compare that to CAD MEP and CAM duct, there's lot of nuance. There's a lot of little sliders and knobs if you will, on ductwork components that really allow you to dial in how that thing is going to be fabricated. And not all of that is yet exposed in Revit.

So this is one of the big areas that we need to look at interaction paradigms. Look at how we expose more of this data, not just within Revit but inside and throughout the AEC Data Model. Another area that we constantly hear feedback on is need for far more flexibility around MEP supports.

So when we look across globally all the different ways that MEP systems are supported, there's a lot of variation from country to country on the different types of components that are available, how it's done. And right now with the fabrication products, there's a hard coded set of patterns that provide certain functionality.

And so what people tend to do is build Revit families to overcome those. Also considering the needs of electrical, it just gets another level of complexity when you look at beyond mechanical.

And so we're considering how we move forward with this. Looking at how the flexibility of Revit provides a lot of flexibility in how anybody could build whatever they want. However, there are certain challenges around having the right category, having this thing actually behave like a hangar, have the right interaction with the structure as well as with the supporting components.

And so considering the flexibility of the Revit platform, we're looking at how to better enable that. And then the last one here, Ian alluded to as well is harmonizing design and fabrication. So again, we see people using these things together, particularly around equipment, specialty valves. They might want actuators. They want to a bit of geometrically show all that stuff.

But there's challenges in that fabrication has services, design has systems, similar concepts but work differently. Graphically they also have different treatments like design. You could apply hatch patterns to the surfaces, whereas fabrication you can't. And then connectivity is another thing.

So if you want that flange family valve or that valve family to interconnect properly with the fabrication element, it's a very manual process right now versus having the intelligence and connectivity on those things as well.

So again, a lot of things to do over time to address this design continuity and harmonizing these things together. So you might have heard earlier this week on the main stage that we announced and launched the MEP Content Editor. So this is again moving c this data that's used to manage all this fabrication data into the cloud was launched earlier this week. Historically, this was known as the MEP Fabrication Data Manager.

But we've renamed it. Historically, been in tech preview for a couple of years. And our focus for this has been on the piping side. So again, we hear a lot of requests around the globe. Hey, why not to be able to do these things in Revit? And a lot of its capabilities, in fact, most of those capabilities already exist on the fabrication part.

So we're trying to make an easier on-ramp for people to use the more complex, more detailed, more intelligent parts around the world. But there are gaps. There are still things that we know that we need to address. So we don't have APIs in place to allow automation, something that we want to get into place eventually.

There's also, the focus on piping means we didn't prioritize things on the ductwork side. So getting into the detail of ductwork specifications, we're not there yet, but we'll get there. And then the last one as I alluded to, ancillaries and cost and labor data. Again, that's not an MEP specific problem. We want to generalize that portion of the AEC Data Model if you will, to enable that to work across the spectrum.

So we've heard a lot today, throughout the week last year and beyond around this cloud connected data and services, Autodesk Platform Services being that foundation and the different industry clouds form a fusion and flow.

And a lot of presentations, end users showing how they're leveraging this information, bringing data into Power BI or whatever the case may be, to really revolutionize the way that they're managing information, whether it's for analysis of the mechanical systems, electrical systems, structural systems. It's a very common pathway of getting all that data in one place.

And the three things that I want to highlight, even though there's plenty of presentations on these topics, is making that data more accessible. Getting outside of individual product boundaries and centralizing that management in a centralized way and across different types of users, providing controlled access. And connecting that, removing silos in how people work together, as well as improving collaboration across different users.

So again, there was a presentation of the mechanical MEP design firm working closely with a contractor, there sharing content. But they might not want to share all the data. They might want to share the aggregate costs, but maybe not the detailed cost of individual components. So by creating new products and services, we could create ways to make that happen.

And then lastly, making the data more useful across the board. Again, that example of cost and labor. The mechanical contractor, electrical contractor, they might be doing things with supplemental steel. They might want to use some of the detailing capabilities in Revit on the steel side to account for different types of supports that they're building up.

And so by having a common platform to support the data ancillaries and so forth, it could be more generalized and suit broader ways of working. And then having all this cloud connected also starts to provide more opportunities when we get into the granular data.

So today, the fabrication configurations, as many of you might know is a bunch of desktop files. So thousands and thousands of files that make up these configurations. The challenge is, is that you need to share that information, when you're updating that information into Revit, it could be a very monolithic and time-consuming process.

We've made improvements over the years to make that faster, but still by having the data in the cloud, once that data is uploaded, it becomes granular data. We're creating new references relationships between the data to make it more resilient to change.

But also this sets the stage for ultimately eventually being able to get to the point where you're making a change to the core data in the cloud and just making that simple change within the Revit model or in the AEC Data Model more generally. So that's the direction we're going with that.

And then lastly, this idea of the Cloud-connected Data Environment and looking at having the different types of data available across different products and services, and getting that information into the data model provides a streamlined pathways of data as opposed to files.

So think about the complexity of mechanical systems, electrical systems. One of the opportunities that we see, you might have heard the announcement about the geometry beta for the AEC Data Model. Well, one of the areas that is key in geometry is getting those flat pattern developments from the model into manufacturing processes.

So we don't have this connected yet. The geometry is just now in beta. We haven't connected the mechanical the ductwork side of this too. But this is a potential opportunity where there are machines out there, plasma tables that you just send it the patterns and it'll mass generate the NC and manufacture it.

Now granted, those are more modern machines and not everybody's going to go to the latest machine, but it provides opportunities for new ways of working, independent of specific products. And providing far more flexibility moving into the future, whether that's our tech stack, specifically within our manufacturing portfolio or through partner applications. So with that, I'll hand it over to Craig that we'll get into some of the details of some of the things that we're presently working on.