Transportation Summit

DREW OLSEN: All right. We are now officially 13 minutes late. I apologize. A last second technical glitch there. So I'm not going to waste too much of a time. I'm Drew Olsen, senior Industry strategy manager for transportation. Welcome all to AU 2017.

And thank you very much for joining the transportation summit today. We've got a crazy lineup of guest speakers, including Autodesk internally as well industry external. So I really don't want to waste too much time up here welcoming us in.

Two housekeeping things I do want to mention. Tomorrow morning, there's a breakfast for the AEC Excellence Awards announcement and awards ceremony. So definitely get registered for that if you're not already and have breakfast with us. And we'll see who the winners are of that excellent competition.

And then one other thing I want to mention is the HP Mars project you've seen on Discovery and some of the things. We've teamed up with them this year as well. So we will be doing some different design slams throughout the day. [AUDIO OUT] would be building out that Mars futuristic-- and from 5:00 to 5:30 I want to mention for sure is the InfraWorks portion of that infrastructure roadway and some different things as part of that Mars project.

Again, action packed agenda. We'll be doing some switching of rooms through the break outs and the networking and the breaks. Kind of walk us through that as we go through it and we need to do it. So with that, no further ado, I would like to bring up please Lisa Campbell who is the senior vice president of business strategy marketing for Autodesk.

[APPLAUSE]

Thank you very much.

LISA CAMPBELL: All right. Thank you. OK. Sound good? Excellent. All right. We're going to see if this works moving this forward. So anyways, welcome everybody. And I believe this is year three of our transportation summit. So I wanted to thank everybody for coming here, we have an amazing lineup of speakers and innovative thinkers to talk to you today about the future of transportation. So we're pretty excited for that.

And one of the things that I wanted to share with you is about 14 years ago I joined Autodesk. So I started out in our infrastructure business. And I always like to say-- yeah. There you go. I launched Civil 3D.

We're losing sound a little bit. So I launched Civil 3D into the marketplace about 14 years ago. And I can remember sitting in groups with people who were involved in transportation, the design, the building, and the operation of infrastructure assets.

And what were we talking about? We were saying how were we going to handle all of the demands on infrastructure? And we were talking about BIM, and how BIM processes were going to help us because of all the projects that we have to do. And now, we're still having that same conversation, but the answers are different. And the answers are different because of what's happening right now in the world today.

So the latest statistics that I've read is that by the year 2050, we're going to have almost 10 billion-- billion with a B-- people on this planet. Now imagine that. 2 and 1/2 billion will be in urban areas. So for all of you that are responsible for infrastructure and our infrastructure assets, the demands on us for how do we respond to the population growth and the fact that we're going to have 2 and 1/2 billion people in urban areas, the demands are incredible. And we really need new disruptive technologies to allow us to respond to that demand.

Now, I want to share some staggering numbers [AUDIO OUT] joy about [AUDIO OUT] structure space. That the numbers are always with a trillion, not billions, it's trillions. This is fun. My speaker's going in and out, in and out. $1.2 trillion. What is that? So the World Economic Forum has basically estimated that there is a funding gap of infrastructure needed to respond to that population growth and the urbanization demands that that is the funding gap, $1.2 trillion.

Staggering. What's more, and some of our speakers are going to be much able to go into detail on this, the American Society of Civil Engineers have estimated that because of the need to repair and refurbish the infrastructure in just the United States, that we are losing about $3.1 trillion in production or commerce because of the state of our infrastructure. And that this will happen by the year 2020.

So think about that. Because of the state of the infrastructure and all the repair and refurbishment that we need to do-- and an interesting fact, is there anybody in here from Germany? OK, well $3.1 trillion, the last estimate I saw, is the GDP of Germany, just to kind of give you a feel for the staggering amount of these dollars that are required for infrastructure.

So when I look at numbers like this, you know, the first thing you sometimes feel is, that's just too big. We're never going to be able to address something that costs that much. And so I believe what we need is we need new disruptive automations in technology to figure out how do we shrink that amount? How do we reduce the cost? And how do we reduce the time it takes to respond to these infrastructure demands?

And I want to talk to you a little bit about that today, which we think of as the future of making things and how that really impacts the infrastructure industry. So, some of the things that we'll talk about today are three disruptive trends. Now, did anybody here this morning get a chance to go to the construct and connect event? OK, so I see a few hands.

They talked a little bit about some of these trends. And I think there's three big, new, disruptive automations that are impacting our ability to respond to these demands of a growing population and the urbanization that's going to happen. And I want to just quickly review those three. And you're going to talk in much more detail today about these.

So the first, not a surprise to many of you, but you hear about drones and the use of UAVs. This new high precision way to survey the as-built environment is fundamentally disrupting how we do efficient planning and engineering of the world's infrastructure. You can actually get an accurate model, and it can actually change the pace at which we are able to repair and refurbish. And this morning, we even had a speaker talk about how it increases safety because you can see anomalies with what has been scanned or photographed and be able to respond to these anomalies in a safer way.

And estimates show that about 25% to 30% of savings happens when you use technology like this because it helps reduce cost and time. What's the second disruptive technology? AR and VR. Immersive experiences. Now, I can tell you I've talked to many times to people who are responsible for infrastructure assets. And they always say, we have so many projects and we can't get these projects reviewed, approved, and funded. And that's our big problem to respond to these demands.

With new technologies like AR and VR and these immersive experiences, your constituents, stakeholders, can now experience that infrastructure before it's even made. And this can pull in approvals and funding of projects. Even being able to pull in a project one to two years can be tens of millions of dollars in savings.

What's the third trend? Machine learning and artificial intelligence. Now, I'm sure many of you have read up on this and I'm just going to give you two simple examples of how this applies to infrastructure. The first is you can actually use computers as another designer in the room with you. And it can actually use whatever your design constraints are. And it can generate thousands of design options, thousands of variants that you as the designer can then choose the most optimal design to meet your requirements.

Something that we could never do before without machine learning and artificial intelligence. The second example is no longer do we have to live in a world of preventative maintenance. We now can go to predictive maintenance. In fact, McKinsey published the study of a train line in Barcelona. They have a 99.98% reliability. Pretty good for a train line. And it's because of the internet of things and sensor technologies, they have all of this sensory data.

And they review this and they are able-- through machine learning and AI-- to spot anomalies before they actually are going to happen and then they'll be able to do predictive maintenance so that you won't have a point of failure. So it's technologies like these that I think allow us to address these big gaps, the $1.2 trillion funding gap that we have for the projects that are necessary.

This is the way that we can reduce what that amount is. We can increase safety. And we can increase the volume of projects. We can do more projects with better outcomes, less time, less cost, and less waste. And today, you're going to hear much more about the future, which is connected BIM. It's not just BIM. Now it's connected BIM, where we are actually connecting, design, and build, and the operation of assets, leveraging the compute power of the cloud to do things that we could never do before.

And that's pretty exciting. I think this is a very exciting time to be in infrastructure. Now, who better to talk to you about the solutions for infrastructure than somebody who's actually managed that at a national level? And so it is my honor to be able to introduce our next speaker. And I'm going to read this introduction. Even though they gave me this really big font, I'm till going to need my glasses.

So I have the pleasure of introducing our next speaker, Secretary Anthony Foxx sitting right up here in front. And let me tell you a little bit about his accomplishments. He is the 17th United States Secretary of Transportation and the former mayor of Charlotte, North Carolina. As Secretary of Transportation, he led an agency with more than 55,000 employees and a budget of $70 billion. $70 billion.

I can't wait to talk to you about how much fun it was to manage a budget of that size. He was confirmed-- this is pretty staggering-- a very rare 100 to zero Senate vote.

[APPLAUSE]

He crafted an ambitious agenda to modernize America. And he pressed Congress to pass the first long term surface transportation bill more than a decade. He also energized the DOTs to embrace innovation by launching the smart city challenge. That's a national competition to implement bold, data-driven ideas to make transportation safer, easier, and more reliable in the city.

And-- as if that's not enough-- he also published Beyond Traffic, a report on the challenges America's infrastructure will face over the next three decades, refocusing the national dialogue on the future of transportation infrastructure. So without further ado, it is my pleasure to introduce Secretary Anthony Foxx.

[APPLAUSE]

ANTHONY FOXX: Thank you, Lisa. Thank you so much. That was wonderful. Thank you. All right, good afternoon, Autodesk University. How's everybody doing this afternoon? Yeah? Excited? I'm pretty excited too because I get to kind of geek out for the next 20 minutes as I talk about one of my favorite subjects, which is how do we take all the innovation that's possible out there and actually see it happen in real life?

And I'm standing in front of 200 practitioners who are doing this work every single day. And it's so exciting for me to be here and to be part of what you all are talking about. So people ask me sometimes, they say, OK, so can you describe US infrastructure? And the way I describe it is I say, it's very simple. If US infrastructure were a basketball team, it would be Kobe, Kareem, Magic, Michael, I mean, Dr. J.

It's just that it's those people at their current age and physical station. That's US infrastructure in a nutshell. Great but old. And our challenge in the US is to figure out how to update, upgrade, and move forward. I want to describe to you, first of all, on a national level some of the great trends and challenges we face. But then I want to talk a little bit about how what Autodesk is doing and what you as practitioners are doing rolls up into that bigger picture.

There are six basic things the country is facing right now. And it's not unlike-- if you're from some other part of the world-- it's not unlike what you're facing wherever you happen to be from. Number one is population demographic changes, the urban inflows to cities and the pressure on urban environments to become more differentiated in their transportation offerings.

Number two is the challenge of moving goods and the fact that at least in the US we have many of our congested areas around urban centers. The Port of Los Angeles and Long Beach will take to two days for goods to get from there to Chicago. But the congestion in Chicago on our rail lines means that it takes two days for those same goods to get through Chicago. That's unacceptable in the 21st century.

Third is climate. The climate is obviously changing. The intensity of weather events we've just seen this fall is increasing. And clearly there is an imperative both to use every tool available to reduce our impacts on climate change but also to build in a more resilient fashion. And fourth, technology.

Lisa was just talking about the role of different technologies in transportation. And my favorite story is just in a few weeks, a lot of us will be getting ready for the Christmas season. And my wife will go online and she will buy gifts for the whole family from various outlets online. And she will smile to herself and tell me how she saved mileage by not going to the mall and buying all these things.

And I'll say to her, honey, you just created 25 trips on a truck for bringing stuff to our house. I'm not sure you netted out better. And so this is a challenge. Technology is not in and of itself positive or negative. It's a question of how we use it. And I'll come back to that. Fifth, governance.

This is a uniquely American problem. Democracy is great. Democracy is good. I believe in democracy. But I go to some parts of the world that one person makes the decision that they're going to build a certain thing and it gets done within a couple of years. In our system, the federal government is a silent partner, states basically maintain and build roads. Local governments run transit systems and local streets.

The commercial aviation system is privately held, as is our freight system. And so we have this spaghetti bowl of governance and responsibility and accountability that make it difficult for national decision-making and nimbleness within our system. It takes us a long time to decide and to move. And frankly for your purposes, you're probably noticing that the public sector is a little slower to adopt some of these technologies precisely for the same reasons.

And then sixth is the social dimension of transportation. I talked in my last few years as Secretary about the history of US infrastructure as a physical dividing point in so many countries. And one of my fears about technology is that even as technology shows us vastly new ways to speed things up and get things done, if our intent is not to create an integrated, inclusive society, we will make the same mistakes of generations in the past.

And so there is a social dimension of this. And just one example of this. In the US, the uptick on smartphones is about 75% penetration rate. And so much of the new rideshare technology and all kinds of things people are using to make use of new tools relies on that smartphone technology. But if you're not in that 75%, how do you access it?

OK, those are the big trends. Now, what does it mean to you? Well, the first thing is there's a lot of conversation in the world about smart cities. And I'd like to think that as we think about smart cities, we will think about this not as a turnkey concept, not as a concept that is wholly one single thing because every place has a different context, a different social context, a different geographic context, a different mobility context, and so forth.

One of the best examples of how the US government actually tried to embrace both the opportunities of technology and also the regional differences was the smart city challenge that we issued back in 2016. Rather than the federal government saying, we're going to put money up and we're going to award it to 10 different cities, we said, we're going to award one to one city. Rather than saying, well, you have to use this technology or that technology we said, no, we want to see what technology cities actually are interested in taking up.

And different cities had different ideas about this. And instead of telling industry, go make up what you want, we started to create through the smart city challenge, a bit of government demand for certain technologies. And governments were starting to tell the technology companies what they wanted. And the conversation was starting to germinate in a way that it hadn't before.

Columbus won the smart city challenge and I look forward to seeing the results. But what also happened was 72 cities around the United States of America began to think about how to use technology and to think about sustainability and to think about equity in ways that they hadn't done before.

And so in many ways, that challenge punched above its weight. But the point is that we had to, as a government, offer an opportunity for these regional differences to present themselves. Now, one story about Columbus that I'll share with you is that there was one area within Columbus that was experiencing a social problem. It was four times the infant mortality rate of the entire country. It was in this one corner of Columbus.

It's a problem that preexisted the smart city challenge. But they used the opportunity of the smart city challenge to try to solve for that. And so as part of their effort, they're going to put kiosks in neighborhoods so folks that don't have smartphones now have access to the same apps that you and I have access to. They're going to create an app that will provide trips to moms who can set up a doctor's appointment and also set up a transit trip along with that doctor's appointment.

And when the bus doesn't show up on time, that trip gets rerun and the appointment gets rerun based on availability of both the trip and the doctor's office. It's an amazing way to look at how social dimensions can be impacted by this technology and driven by the public sector.

So the point is that our technologies can do amazing things for us. The second point that I'll make is that, given all those trends I talked about, every marginal dollar in transportation has to punch above its weight. Every marginal dollar in transportation has to punch above its weight.

And so if a project that would have cost a billion dollars can be done-- in over six years-- can be done in two years at a cost of $600 million, government wins and the public wins. And I think that one of the challenges that you may be facing is that you get episodic opportunities to show the value of this infrastructure, the value of the technologies. But the government is eventually going to have to adopt some of these technologies with you in order to really achieve those goals.

So at USDOT, for example, I talked to my Federal Highway Administration about some of the major projects in the country. Show me the permitting applications, I said. Let me see them. I was expecting to go to a computer and have someone pull it up, and flip different pages for me. But what I saw was a stack of paper with US postal service, FedEx, UPS. And so show me the designs on it.

Let me take my thumb and try to show you the page, secretary. This is not the way we're going to make progress. And yet some of it is driven at the federal level by a failure to adopt digital inroads to state and local governments. Some of it is at the state and local level. And so we need to help-- and this is one of the reasons why I love Autodesk University-- is that we need to not only have this great effort in the private sector to realize the benefits of speeding things up, making them more efficient, using technology, but we've got to get our counterparts in the public sector to also adopt.

So why doesn't that happen more? It's very simple. I'll tell you. The person that's been doing this job for 20 years the old way doesn't necessarily want to rapidly change to doing it differently. That startup cost in government is scary to people in government. And so a lot of what you're doing and a lot of what you can do by even using it within your own contracts and so forth, is to help show the public sector that it's not a scary. And that's really critical at this time.

Last point is that as we adopt technology, as we see the benefits of this in the US, at least, we've got to be able to aggregate our successes. You know, how many times have I been-- I've been to a few ribbon cuttings in my public life, and a few openings of different transportation facilities. And it's always great when the mayor or the governor stands up and says, this project was done early and it was under budget.

Everybody wants to be able to say that. But in the public sector, what we need folks to say is not only did this project happen before time and under budget but actually we've built a system to enable us to do that with every project. That's really where we need to go.

So how do you do it, I think part of it is the federal government needs to do more than just dole out money to the states. I think we need to start having a conversation about greater standards and accountability with how those dollars are spent. I think we need leadership at the state and local levels to realize that we have ways to save money and maybe even some challenges on a project by project basis that give their teams experience working with new technologies, kind of like the smart city challenge.

I also think that some of our friends around the world who are using these tools as you'll hear later about an example in Paris, using these tools will also show us that these can be used effectively. Having said that, I am so pleased that Autodesk is a company that is doing this not only in the US but around the world. I'm a big fan. I got to see some of its work as Secretary. And I look forward to continuing to help evangelize the importance of technology and transportation in the future.

So thank you very much. I'm going to sit down and have a little Q&A here and I'll look forward to the conversation.

[APPLAUSE]

DREW OLSEN: Thank you so much, Mr. Secretary.

ANTHONY FOXX: Thank you.

DREW OLSEN: Appreciate it. That was really good. So at this point, I'm going to bring up Nikola Mangon, vise president of business strategy marketing for the AEC sector to do a little Q&A.

[APPLAUSE]

ANTHONY FOXX: Absolutely.

NIKOLA MANGON: So Secretary Foxx, that's very inspiring. So thank you very much. I'm a civil engineer myself, so I could not be happier than have the discussion with you. So a couple of questions. So by the way, your flight is late. So hopefully it's not a transportation problem.

ANTHONY FOXX: Yeah, exactly. It's not like the old days.

NIKOLA MANGON: Yes. So we have a global audience and people from Europe and Asia and multiple places. And Lisa mentioned that one of the big challenges for us will be population moving to cities. And actually, there will be a rate of about 300,000 people moving to cities every day. So how can we plan for that?

ANTHONY FOXX: It's a great question. We have tools today that are well beyond tools of yesterday in terms of predictive planning tools. We can actually model population growth and where folks are likely to land in terms of where they live, where they work, and so forth. There's a lot more we can know about the future today than we did at one time. And I think planning from a transportation standpoint is absolutely the number one most important thing we can be doing because if you have good plans, then the people who you represent can get the benefit of those plans.

But if you plan poorly, you can invest all sorts of money but it won't solve your transportation problems. That's number one. There's a lot of data. As you well know, there's a lot of data sitting around in governments that isn't being utilized to help do this. And in the US, part of the governor's challenge is that transit agencies hold their transit data. They will report some of it up to the federal government but they've got far more.

States have different data sets. The federal government has some data sets that are aggregated, some different. But we've got to figure out how, across governmental lines, to bring that data together and to make it useful in the decision making at every level.

NIKOLA MANGON: Thank you. My next question before you catch your flight, so again, we have a global audience. So how do you think you can help all the regions to benefit from your experience?

ANTHONY FOXX: Sure

NIKOLA MANGON: And what kind of differences do you see in this region with the US?

ANTHONY FOXX: So I've had a good opportunity to travel around the world and see infrastructure in a variety of settings. And one of the things I'll say at the outset is that transportation is a common language. I speak poor French.

NIKOLA MANGON: Me too.

ANTHONY FOXX: No, you speak great. But the challenges that France faces with transportation are not completely unlike the challenges I face. So every place I go, I can learn lessons. Here's what I would say, if I were in a lower developed country, let's say, and we were looking to put first big highway system in place or the most elaborate street networks in place, or go multimodal, let's say, I'd try to find all of the newest stuff, whether it's sensor technology, LIDAR, whatever it is.

I would put it in my system because those areas actually have the ability to leverage the collective knowledge of the rest of the world and build highly technically sound systems at the outset as opposed to having to retrofit, which is what we're having to do in the US. If I were in, let's say, Europe and I don't want to steal the thunder of the next speaker but I think they're doing some incredibly smart things, not just by picking routes for transportation, but by picking modalities of transportation that are least disruptive to the built environment and are most able to leverage the possibilities of land use and population density to build housing in places, you know, centers where people want to congregate.

The last thing I'd say is that in the US, our biggest challenge in the US is getting everyone on the same page. We need the states, local governments, the federal government. And frankly, I think we can learn a lot from a lot of the countries out there that have national building programs, because that's something we lack in the US is actually an imperative to build something at the national level, like the interstate highway system, like the transcontinental railroad.

We're relying on state partners to build a lot of the stuff we need. But that's fraught with problems if two states don't agree on something that is needed to cross state lines, for example. So I think we've got to solve that problem and I think a National Building program would help.

NIKOLA MANGON: OK, thank you. So last question.

ANTHONY FOXX: Yeah.

NIKOLA MANGON: So at Autodesk we speak about the future of making things, and we talk about autonomous vehicles. We talk about IoT and things like that, do you think governments will invest in these technologies and mandate the usage of these technologies moving forward?

ANTHONY FOXX: I think government would be foolish not to acknowledge the rapid transformation that's happening in transportation. And whether that is rule setting from a safety standpoint, whether it is engaging with industry on issues of cybersecurity, privacy, liability issues and so forth, whether it is also thinking about how government needs to change to react to this, one of the issues in the US government is it takes us probably three or four years to create a rule. It took us four years to draft the connected vehicle rule, which as I understand it, is now being pulled down.

Another story. And the length of time it can take a rulemaking to go through the process now with the rapid changes, we could be two or three generations into a technology before that rule gets adopted and it could be obsolete the day it gets finalized. So I think the government's going to have to develop new competencies, increase its speed, and really think about whether the skill sets that we have in government, as good as the people are, there may be skill sets we need in government to help us keep up and move faster as the industry moves faster.

NIKOLA MANGON: All right, thank you very much.

ANTHONY FOXX: Thank you. I really appreciate it. Thanks. Thank you.

[APPLAUSE]

NIKOLA MANGON: Wow, that's pretty inspiring. So I'm delighted to be here. I guess they asked me to come because the next speaker is a French, like you know, where I'm from originally. So I want to talk about the next speaker. So Bernard Cathelain, coming from Paris, graduated from one of the most prestigious civil engineering schools in Europe, the Ecole Polytechnique.

And he worked in DOTs organizations, DOTs-like organization. He worked in construction. He worked in design. So he brings a lot of knowledge about the complete lifecycle of projects in our industry. And today he's one of the board members of the Grand Paris Project, which is, he's going to tell us, one of the largest, if not the largest infrastructure project in the world. So please welcome Bernard Cathelain.

[APPLAUSE]

BERNARD CATHELAIN: Good afternoon to everyone. It's really impressive to be here, especially after the Secretary Foxx. I'm very glad to make this presentation of this project, the Grand Paris Express, which is indeed one of the biggest project, transport projects in the world, maybe the biggest, and almost on such a scale.

What is Grand Paris Express? Grand Paris Express, I should say, is the new metro of the French capital region. But it's not only that. It's also a project of gigantic size with the objective to create a new momentum and to multiply the economic development all around the region, throughout the region.

This project is already underway. It's a project which involves the construction of 200 kilometers of new lines, new automatic metro lines, and 68 new stations. So before this explanation, if it works, let's speak a little bit about what is Grand Paris Region itself. It's a huge region, of course.

We have 11.7 inhabitants. We have 5.7 million jobs. And it represents about 30% of the French GDP. So we can say that Grand Paris is the leading power, the leading economic power of continental Europe. We have a high performance infrastructure. We have transport networks, of course. We have public equipment.

We have airport connections. We have free international airports inside of the region. But even though we are an historical leader, we are the fifth city in the world for the creation of wealth. We are the 32nd global economic power. But we are, of course, subjected to a fierce competition between international cities.

So we are-- in this competition, we are facing big challenges. You have here some of these challenges. The first one is the housing shortage. The cost of housing inside the region is increasingly disconnected from the economic reality of local residents. Inside the Grand Paris region, we have about 20% of the French population but we have only 10% of the global housing construction. So you see the disparity.

We have also pollutions with the level of nitrogen dioxide and particles, which often exceed the limit. We have each year a civil pollution peak with several incidents. We have territorial and social imbalance with the highest average standard of living in mainland France. We have also the region have also the widest disparity.

And we have, of course, congested transport infrastructure. Paris is in Europe in the top six most congested cities. We have, of course, a very developed transport system. But this transport system is mainly radial. So one of the objectives of our project is to deal with these challenges.

And you have here the presentation of these challenges. The Grand Paris Express is a project of urban development based on the creation of 200 km of additional transport network and as I said, 68 new stations. You have on this map, on the central part, you have Paris in gray. And we are creating four new automatic metro lines. And the extension of the existing line 14 north and south up to the Orly airport.

These lines will should be under operation between 2019 for the first one and 2030. But of course we have a lot of lines which are expected for the Olympic games in 2024. With this project, it means that about 90% of the Paris region residents will have a station at least two kilometers from their home, so very close.

With this project, each urban area of a region will be linked to each other and to Paris. And this is the main objective of this project, to connect this different area without being obliged to go throughout Paris, the city of Paris itself. The project will serve the three Paris airports, together with the existing cities business centers, scientific hubs, as you can see, are on the map. But also it will enhance the implementation of new development areas, business centers, research hubs.

All this will be accelerated by the metro. So that's it. 200 kilometers of lines added to the existing 400 kilometer in the Paris region. So 50% increase. 68 stations. Seven technical centers. We expect two million travelers daily inside. 100% accessible for people, of course, for people with reduced mobility. One train every two to three minutes, a traveling speed of 55 kilometers per hour, 100% automatic, and one but not least, I think the biggest challenge we have to face, 90% of this network will be underground.

So to sum up, it's a project of urban transformation, based on the largest transport project in Europe. And I say it once again, on such a scale, I think the biggest project in the world, a project of $30 billion euros. Of course, we expect many socioeconomic benefits. This project is set to directly create 15,000 jobs per year in the Grand Paris region, of course, during the construction period.

And when completed, the new metro should lead to other 115,000 jobs in addition to those created by the natural growth in the region, leading to 60 billion euros of socioeconomic profit. It means a return on investment between 7% and 8%. And the project is expected to generate for the capital region over 100 billion extra GNP long term, adding to the current GNP which is presently 600 billion.

To review this introduction, let's see a short video of presentation of the project.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

So where do we stand right now? As you can see, this project is already under construction. We have three lines under construction presently. And 14 station are already under construction as well, meaning that we have already placed 3.5 billion euros of orders with construction companies. So when you come to Paris, you may not see it everywhere, but I must say that the capital region is getting to experience more than 10 years of construction, which, of course, it's much to be seen.

As you can see, our project is not only a transport project but also an urban transformation project for the metropolis. One aspect of this transformation is the station we are building. These stations are planned to impulse new urban dynamic in the surroundings. And indeed, we have not only accesses to the new metro, not only accesses to the new metro, but new stations designed as new living spaces with every facilities you want to have inside.

We have 37 different architecture agencies working on the project. Some of them [AUDIO OUT]. For instance, you have this station designed by Kengo Kuma, which is the [FRENCH] station not far from [FRENCH]. This station will serve also some complexes around [FRENCH] and the future Olympic village, which is very close to this station.

Another example is this one. This station is an elliptical a station, Villejuiff Institut Gustave Roussy station on south part of Paris, designed by the French architect Dominique Perrault. It will create a link between the outside and the inside, between the ground level and the Grand Paris Express platforms. In this specific station, we are 50 meters underground. Our metro is usually very, very deep. And this station is one of the deepest.

And above this station, I must say that you are very fortunate because we have a model of this station. And this model has got a visa to enter the United States. And this model is visible, will be visible, in the exhibit hall at the [FRENCH]. So I suggest you do go there and have a closer look. This is, I think, a very beautiful station.

But let's start talking about BIM. This is the subject here, I think. Because this project is quite a long time project, as I said, 15 years to be completed, with the highest complexity. And it was inconceivable for us not to use BIM. Inconceivable during the construction process because of the numerous interaction of different technologies, in addition to the complexity of very deep construction, some station 50 meters deep. It's one aspect of this complexity.

And inconceivable also for maintenance and operation afterwards. This project will be under operation in 2030, completely in operation. And at that time, we think it's completely compulsory to have been for this operation. It was, for us, a voluntary action because BIM is not in France mandatory. So we have just a recommendation. Of course, it was quite obvious, quite easy to decide to go with BIM.

Of course, it was a little bit more difficult to spread these requirements and all of our projects. That's one of the difficulties, one of the aspects we have to deal with. So if we don't, we have launched a BIM master plan. With a BIM charter describing our policy in terms of quality and performance requirement, BIM specification books, which are a rendering of this charter for all partners, BIM execution plans produced by the entities in charge of BIM management, which have the answer of the specification books.

So here is the result. You have here on this video the BIM project for a [FRENCH] station designed by Systra, one of our partners in this project. This station is the deepest of the Grand Paris Express with 53 meters between the ground level and the train platform.

OK, here is another example with Chelles station and ventilation well design of course. Mainly with Autodesk product, I should have said it earlier. This project was also designed by Egis, one of our partner. This example is special interesting because it involves tunnels, which is quite unprecedented on such a scale. Here, you have well, the connection between tunnel and well, installations, such as specific devices, such as light, exhaust system, telecom network, lots of pipe, [INAUDIBLE], cable trays, platform screens, walkways, platform screens here.

Platform equip, such as light, video, and signage. We go outside the station. But here you have technical installations. And here the electrical facilities such as rectification substations and power stations. So this was Chelles stations and the surroundings. And last but not least, I am very proud to say that we have won with our partner Egis with this station, the BIM D'OR the golden BIM, which is the first award in the biggest competition about BIM in France. So I will have-- I have heard that there is also a competition here, an Autodesk competition.

I think tomorrow [INAUDIBLE]. Maybe it's too late for this year. But you must consider that I would be very glad to come back next year and to return in France maybe with your support with some award. So please remember that. Thank you very much.

[APPLAUSE]

NIKOLA MANGON: Thank you very much, Bernard. Wow, inspiring as well. So Bernard, I live in Boston right now. I lived in Paris for many years, and you know, as many years in Boston. And we had this big project, the Big Dig. And you know, people thought it would be $1 billion project and then it became a $20 billion project. So with such a large project, 200 kilometers of rail, how do you use technology to make sure you stay on time and on budget?

BERNARD CATHELAIN: Well, indeed, it's the biggest challenge we have to face. We use technology not only on BIM aspect. We have connection with master plan. We have a connection with everything we are doing to pilot this project. So it's really important to have everyone working on the same level and to be able to use these devices such as BIM in order to be capable to know what are the connection, what are the possibilities of changes, or to make the evolution inside the project because such a project, a long term project, we will know some changes during the construction process.