Earlier this year, AECOM Hunt completed construction on Walnut Grove Elementary School near Indianapolis, building on an otherwise undeveloped green site. But there was no need up front to build a fresh model of the site in design software. Working in Autodesk Civil 3D, AECOM Hunt had elevation and edge-of-curve data layered against GIS data which was supplemented with drone captures. This blended data was used to track excavation work, and the landscaping crew even used it for quantity take-offs when they had to verify grades.

在GIS巨头ESRI和BIM软件供应商Autodesk在数据共享计划上的合作伙伴关系之前，该特定的工作流程将不那么顺利，这需要Aecom Hunt的设计师在其BIM软件中慢慢重新创建网站的地理空间数据。

AECOM Hunt的BIM/VDC经理Russ Dalton说：“拥有新的数据兼容性加快了我们的流程。”“工作流程相同但更快。通过消除手动步骤传输数据，我们的过程更有效，并且自动化易于人为错误。”

Dalton says before the partnership, AECOM Hunt would access Esri data inside AutoCAD maps with a link to a separate program. The new process has accelerated their workflow, and AECOM Hunt can sync LiDAR data directly into its Revit models now.

Getting to this point has been a multidecade goal for Esri CEO Jack Dangermond, who has long touted openness for the products his company makes. Founded as the nonprofit Environmental Systems Research Institute in Redlands, Calif., Esri is now the world’s largest GIS software provider, overseeing the widely used mapping standard ArcGIS. Getting GIS data directly into construction, Dangermond believes, could help the environment and create the efficiencies he believes are necessary to combat climate change.

“It’s not about the open data, it’s about connecting tools to tools at the data level so that, bang! It just changes things,” Dangermond said during a media Q&A at Autodesk University earlier this year. “There’s a GIS view of the world and there’s the whole engineering, construction, design, build view of the world. The GIS view, for those who don’t know it, is we measure things and we visualize things. Then we do analytics and we support design tools and then people take it to action,” he said.

道尔顿解释说,Dangermond和欧特克首席执行官drew Anagnost’s agreement in November of 2017 was only the beginning of the process to share the data. That effort required engineers from each company to build data workflows that were useful for the other side, a process that meant long hours of development for teams at both companies. AECOM is a strategic partner with both Autodesk and Esri and was eager to get in on that pilot effort.

“We’ve participated in many of their user testing phases and in addition provide feedback,” says John Kizior, global director, project technologies at AECOM. “We encourage all our users to give active feedback on any BIM/GIS workflows or new-use cases,” he says.

这些会话中出现的一种意外用途是将BIM数据放入GIS而不是相反。在澳大利亚基础设施项目中，AECOM设计团队从CAD/LIDAR开始，然后直接创建了一个模型，以BIM为单位。客户希望看到该模型进入GIS环境以证明工作流程。AECOM的架构师和工程师从Revit中提取了IFC文件，然后将其移至ArcGIS中。

“This grounded the model by putting it into its actual location in space,” says Antoine Burdett, AECOM principal for information management in Brisbane. “It gives us the ability to see critical infrastructure upgrades and modifications and help clients understand how proposed designs will impact them geographically. We are using liDAR to BIM and then moving it into GIS with attributes.”

The proof of concept showed Burdett’s client the company’s capabilities and proved the value of the existing, aging infrastructure.

“What we’re doing is integrating our contextual data right into Revit or into Civil 3D or into Infraworks or AutoCAD, so that they can read our services,” Dangermond said. “It’s not enough to be open data. It’s about doing the hard engineering work to bring that contextualized data directly into the system and then support field operations and do analytics and then do digital delivery across the web.”