Unlocking Autodesk Civil 3D Data Flow with Autodesk Data Exchange

FRODE TORRESDAL: Hello and welcome to this class about unlocking Autodesk Civil 3D Data Flow with Autodesk Data Exchange. My name is Frode Torresdal. I'm Head of Development in Norconsult. And as a co-speaker, I have Marius Jablonskis who is a digital transformation leader. In this presentation, we will go through some beta stuff. So we have a safe harbor statement here. So this should not be used in any critical business application.

So back to the presentation, Civil 3D software has dominated infrastructure and renewable energy sectors for many years. And industry has both adopted the native functionality but also expanded it with custom applications over the years, which has created cross-interoperability challenges. And currently moving towards digital twin, efficient data flows beyond design and construction phases is becoming increasingly important.

In this class, we will showcase how with the help of Autodesk Data Exchange we can break the silos and enable the transition towards digital twins. And the key takeaways and the learning objectives from this class will be that we discover the value of integrated design and business data for informed decision making. We will also explore the significance of data flow beyond design and construction, and discover the capability of Autodesk Data Exchange in breaking down silos and enabling efficient transfer of information. And we will gain practical insight on maximizing the Data Exchange for seamless collaboration and transition to digital twins.

And a little bit about the company, so Norconsult is Norway's largest multidisciplinary consultant company. We have expertise in buildings, transport, renewable energy, water industry, environment, risk management, architecture planning, and digitalization. We have close to 30,000 projects each year, and we are close to 6,000 employees. And we are a technology supplier for the entire life cycle of building and infrastructure, and also we have been a certified Autodesk platform service integrator and developer since 2015.

But before I start with the technical stuff, I would like Marius, my co-speaker, to go through some of the projects we are working with.

MARIUS JABLONSKIS: So digitalization in renewable energy sector, there is many similar things like in all of the cases, the result is the same. You were producing energy. But there is some key differences there as well. So on the one side, we take the hydro power as an example, here we have pioneered drone-less construction many years ago, where we fully integrated the BIM models with all of the necessary metadata. So for construction operation by directly integrated into models. And digital twin is being used as a basis for all of the processes here.

Again, necessity for such collaboration is quite huge here. There is many different interfaces that needs to be controlled and coordinated. For example, a turbine element of itself, which is an extremely costly device, and even minor adjustments in the geometry might have a huge impact on the electricity produced over many years, since its operating 24/7. So the demands for both geometry and data are quite huge there. Therefore, the push towards more integrated BIM was done a while ago.

On the other hand, you have industries like solar power, which is mainly still a CAD dominated industry. Again, you talk about large areas. And again, there is necessity for water drainage, site elevations, and et cetera. In many cases, again then you start with Civil 3D, and then you use blocks and different 3D layouts to optimize the sites. But in addition to that, again over many years, there was many solutions that was built on top in the market, on top of AutoCAD. Which again, helps to automate some processes. But in many cases, again, the data is getting locked in proprietary solutions. Slide?

So talking again a little bit more in depth about what solar power is and what the power plants contain, here again, in this case we'll be talking about ground mounted plants. And again, since there is many different ways again to generate the electricity using solar power, just to be specific, we'll be talking about photovoltaic technology where directly sunlight is transformed into electricity using solar panels.

Again, here the game is in the numbers. If you take one cell and then you multiply it many times, you get one panel. If you multiply that panel, you get one array. And if you multiply those arrays, you will get the solar plant through that. And here, again, let's go next.

And here you will see that the complexity is not actually challenging geometry or interfaces, but in the sheer scope of it. Imagine kilometers of exactly the same infrastructure around you. So how do you plan all of the logistics construction of it has a very big impact. And again, inefficiencies that you have on one execution, if you times it multiple times, that can result in really big inefficiencies.

Again, if we look at the classical approach, what we in industry are dealing with mainly again it's the detailed engineering, sometimes the early design, and then again the construction. So I think we have quite good control over that. There is many solutions out in the market that allows us to integrate the information back and forth, and make sure that the information is not being lost there.

But again, from the owner's perspective, next slide. They have to deal with a way wider project-- how do you say-- stand. Again, even before the first lines are drawn, there is many, many, many business decisions that needs to be made. Sites have to be found, scouted, and then again everything needs to-- how to say-- in the end make a profit.

So then how do you access the information? How do you access your experiential information in order to make sure that you make right decisions at the right time is of the essence. And if you take the next slide for that.

In reality again, there is multiple people, multiple roles in those projects that some of them are responsible for supply chain, cost controls, and quality, and et cetera. And being a segregated industry, you need to access information. And information as of today is not always available in one place. So sometimes you need to search for it. Sometimes you need to make sure that it's latest up to date information. So basically in every single phase, you have a information loss. And again, once even projects are executed, how do you capture that operational experience and transfer that further in better design choices and business decisions is of essence here.

Next slide. So again, the main challenges that we would be dealing there is that, again, there is traditional file based deliveries. The information would be residing on separate places. Not everyone necessarily would be having access at the right times. And then again, there is no single solution that could cover the whole scope because there is a separate different historical solutions being used in the industry before. And again, it's operating in a very low-cost margin industry.

So huge, huge, huge implementations are difficult. There is silos, and the data access issues, and again the embedded information flow that was named earlier. So how do you approach that when you have already solutions for, for example, operation and maintenance that your document control uses certain solutions? You have to deal with Excel, PDFs, and different drawings.

So without changing that too much, we hope that Autodesk Data Exchange could be a valuable solution. Here what we're expecting to achieve in our little study is, again to break those silos and share specific subsets of data. We're not talking about sending files back and forth, but just necessary information, making sure that it's always up to date and automating the whole process, making the whole data flow a little bit more fluid.

And I think it's time now to look into the technical solution. So back to you for that.

FRODE TORRESDAL: Yes. Thank you. So we're now going to take a look at the technical solution and see in action how we have unlocked the data flow using the Autodesk Data Exchange. First, just giving a short explanation of what Data Exchange is. There are other classes that go into much more depth. In our class, we'll focus on how we have used the Data Exchange.

So this is taken from the Autodesk website, that Forge Data Exchanges help you unlock your data and give you the flexibility to share the right bits with the right stakeholders at the right time, no matter the app or industry you work in. And that's a very precise explanation. And also note that this Data Exchange is in beta and early access when this class is recorded. And we have not used this in production for critical operations. And you should not do that yourself as well.

So Autodesk created this collaboration tool that supports managed, trackable, and data sharing workflow. And as you see here, a model can go from Autodesk Revit into the cloud information model, back into Inventor, and into the cloud information model again, and then through the exchanges go to third-party applications, like in this case Rhino 3D. And the purpose is to share the right data with the right persons in the right context, instead of sharing massive files with minimal control over data noise and who has access to what.

And the sharers protect intellectual property, while downstream receivers selectively consume the data they care about in their app of choice. And all the while, it can reduce latency in the user's cloud workflow and reduce cloud storage costs. It is, in other words, an integration platform.

There are a lot of connectors available from Autodesk. And in this class, we will show how we have used the Civil 3D Connector and the Power Automate Connector. Power Automate is a tool from Microsoft to automate flows. And I will get back to that and show you some examples.

But before we go into details about the connector, I would like to talk a bit about the information flow in our use case. The design tool is Autodesk Civil 3D, and the models and the exchanges are stored in Autodesk Construction Cloud. And the project also uses SharePoint as a collaborative platform where among many other things, prices from various suppliers are stored in PDF files. And using the Data Exchange for Power Automate, we can then automatically update price calculation in Excel spreadsheets, update dashboards using Power BI, and publish messages on team channels.

So let's show an example of how this is done in practice. What you see here is a model in Civil 3D of a solar plant, or more precisely a PV facility. We would like to populate an Excel with amount of the various arrays of panels. And we create a Data Exchange using the Civil 3D Connector, and to reduce the amount of data we filter by the layers that contains the objects that we are interested in.

So as I talked about earlier, we like to reduce the data that are sent in the exchange. And in this case, that is just the panel arrays. So when an exchange has been published, it's possible to view the model in ACC. And as you can see here, it's just the panels that has been exported. And there are in this case three types of arrays of panels. It's 2 times 2, 2 times 13, and 2 times 26.

So here you see Power Automate, and how the user interface look. And before we look how to populate an Excel spreadsheet, I will show how we made a simple workflow that automatically publishes a message on team channel when a new exchange is published.

So here you see my flows. In Power Automate, I can create a new flow from a template. I then search for Autodesk. They have made some templates that you can use. And there is one here called Teams Notification on Exchange Creation. So here you will select the hub where your projects are located. You will select the project. You will select the top folder and then the exchange folder where the flow will listen for new exchanges that are published.

And in Teams, you will select the team where you would like to publish a message. And then you will select the channel that the message should be published in. You edit the message by putting in text, and also dynamic content. So you can combine those. So I put some text that will always be there, and we'll also use the search here, because there are a lot of data from the exchange. But in this case, I will have the Data Exchange file name, and have some text afterwards saying that it has been published and who it has been published by.

And also in Teams you will have a subject, so you will also have the same possibility here by writing combining text and dynamic content. And when you're finished and unsatisfied with the flow, you will save it. And when you save it, it will be ready to be used, and it's activated. And then if you publish a new exchange, you will get this new message in the team's channel.

So back to the Excel case. In our SharePoint portal, we have a simple spreadsheet that calculates the prices based on a number of the various panel types. And as you can see here in the K column, we have created a table that we will populate with data from the design model. The prices are updated with the latest information from various suppliers that typically are delivered in PDF files. And this is automatically done in SharePoint using Power Automate.

So how do we create this flow? Well, we do more or less the same. With Data Exchange, you select a hub, project, top folder, and here we select a Data Exchange that we already have in that selected folder. And the initialize variable step will just initialize a cursor that you will use to iterate through the exchange.

And we get the properties for each object in the exchange, and adds property values to the next row in the table in Excel. And as you can see, we specify the Excel file, the table name, and the name of the column in the table. In this case, it's quite simple. The property is just the name of the object. And we can have much more complicated flows here. But it's intentionally kept simple to show the principles.

And when we're done, we can save our Power Automate flow, and activate it. And the next time when we go back to Civil 3D, we make some changes to the design, and we publish an update to the exchange, the Excel is automatically updated. And you see here the K column, the table has been updated. And we have also get the number of the various types of panels. There's 32 times 2 panels or 2 times 13 panels, and so it goes on. And that also gets the total of panels, and you also get the prices. And this Excel file is also located in the project's SharePoint portal.

So we can then use this data together with data from other sources to create dashboards with Power BI that are up to date, consumable, and accessible, and very good for accurate decision makings. It's very important to act quickly here. There could be very large changes in prices of components. And Marius will come back to this in the end.

So what do you do if the off-the-shelf tool is not enough? We have experienced that even if there are some great tools out there, you sometimes do have to take extra steps to get the data flow that you want and need. And then one option is to create your own tool. And this requires coding skills, and the details here are beyond the scope of this class. But I will give you an overview of the possibilities.

So Autodesk has provided us with some APIs. And what is an API? It's an acronym for Application Programming Interface, and a software interface that allows two applications to talk to each other. And APIs are an accessible way to extract and share data within and across organizations.

And Autodesk then has a RESTful API for data exchanges. It's an architectural style for an application program interface that uses HTTP requests to access and use data. And also there is a .NET SDK. .NET is a software framework from Microsoft, and a coding language is often C#. Autodesk provides a software developer kit for NET that makes it easier to develop your application. And the SDKs, it uses the REST APIs behind the scenes.

And finally there's the GraphQL. It's a query language for APIs. And GraphQL provides a complete and understandable description of the data in your API, and giving you the power to ask for exactly what you need and nothing more.

What we see here is a helpful tool from Autodesk that helps you to try out your graph queries. Here we ask to get the projects in a hub, and return value is a JSON object. And there can be huge amounts of data here, and GraphQL can be very useful. And here it's illustrated with a tool that we used to visualize the nodes and connections we get when using the APIs.

This is an entire facility. And as you can see, there's quite a lot of data. And even if we have created an exchange with just the data we need, there is still lots of connections and nodes here. When using GraphQL it's essential that you do not get all the data, but just query for what you need.

Very often when we work with the development phase, we usually use a much smaller data set to make it easier and faster to create the flows that we need. And if we create a data exchange with just one area of panels, we get this. And as you see, this is much simpler to work with, and much more understandable, and easier to find what you need.

So when you do get an overview of the APIs, the SDKs, and exchange data, it's time to create your own applications. So what we have done, we have looked in Norconsult at integrating data from carbon footprint software, and structured analysis software, using these APIs. And this can be desktop applications, web applications with user interfaces, or just services that are running.

Another useful thing could be to make your own API that you use in your Power Automate flow. It really depends on what you need to automate, and if there is any need for user input. It's even possible to create your own connector and add in that to your own software that does not have a connector. And without too much effort, this is possible to do with the SDKs, and it has a ready-to-use user interface and functionality to get you started in no time.

But before we get too technical here, I think I will let Marius wrap this up with a summary.

MARIUS JABLONSKIS: Thank you. So here have you seen again that the solution is functioning? They have tried it out again, not in real production but again, proof of concept here shows that even without major overhauling your old workflows introducing new costly solutions, you're able to streamline the data with Autodesk Data Exchange. Again, eliminating or at least minimizing the data loss in between, and enabling two-ways path data flow across all of the project phases.

So again, Data Exchange enables integration, integrating design and business data from for informed decision making, again, data flow beyond the design and construction into operational or business opportunity phases, improved reaction times on potential risks and market changes. As was mentioned earlier, it's a quite volatile market. The changes are happening quite fast. And again, it's critical to react if you need to reevaluate different solutions, layouts, alternative components, or maybe shut down the whole thing before it started to be unprofitable.

Again, breaking down silos and efficient information transfer is the whole point here, especially taking into account that some people are not even working with the graphical information. Somebody doesn't need the models. They just need some specific data in order to do their work. So again, Data Exchange enables those things, and we're happy to say that again, the proof of concept was successful.

So next slide for that. And that would be the last one. Thank you for your attention.