Autodesk Previews Exciting New Editions For Construction and Manufacturing

By Nick Harris

Last time I talked briefly about the Product Innovation Keynote session at Autodesk University London 2017 and I promised that I would talk in more detail about a couple of the industry specific sections.

Sarah Hodges, Autodesk Director for BIM 360, had the remit to talk about the Autodesk construction portfolio and make some announcements about future product updates. The BIM 360 product group has seen a huge amount of investment with new ways to collaborate and co-ordinate on the way.

The platform for future BIM 360 enhancements is based on what Autodesk is calling the Common Data Environment (CDE). This is a very familiar term to anyone involved in delivering UK BIM level 2 projects as it is the mechanism by which building information models are exchanged and shared. But where the CDE outlined in the UK BIM standards is predicated on the movement of individual files through the construction process, Autodesk’s is all about the data. Its vision is to put the project at the centre of the process rather than the technology and it has defined four essential requirements for its BIM 360 based CDE. Sarah described how the platform would be extensible for anyone who wishes to develop their own solutions that need to consume the project data. Concurrency is  important so that many different contributors can work on the same project simultaneously.  Sarah also talked about how it was important that it was interoperable with existing standards and applications. Finally, she described how project controls would be built in the start so that security and workflows met the need of complex, multi-company collaborative working.

Sarah then continued to give us a glimpse of some technology built on the BIM 360 common data environment platform. The first example, looking like the new BIM 360 Docs, was described as a design collaboration module. Called Design Collaboration it appeared to give the ability to manage multiple design interactions from multiple design consultants over the duration of the project.  This is an incredibly powerful tool for giving a top-down, centralised view of how the project is developing and where important decisions were made. The next preview was of a model coordination module, again simply called Model Coordination, that allowed design consultants to compare multiple discipline models in real-time. The connected nature of the Autodesk CDE meant that as designers in different companies made changes, the rest of the contributors would be notified if a clash appeared, as it happened. Finally, we saw a preview of the Insight module. This is where all the information from the other modules is collated and presented in reports and dashboards. Again, the preview looked good, the project data was presented in a clear format and significantly, this new portal removes the need to visit each BIM 360 module to get an update on that part of the project.

Stephen Hooper took over for a section on Fusion 360, aimed at the industrial design part of the audience. In a similar way to BIM 360, Fusion 360 benefits from being a cloud based, connected platform that is getting plenty of investment form Autodesk. Stephen talked about the modelling, simulation and CAM capabilities that are already available to customers now and described Fusion 360 as the next generation, product innovation platform.

Two forthcoming innovations that look particularly exciting for all users are the ability to use Fusion within any modern web browser, regardless of platform and also a forthcoming module called Fusion Production. Browser access let users get access to their design data and edit it anytime and anywhere. For anyone that has been using CAD for as long as I have this innovation is incredible. The ability to carry out complex design tasks on the thinnest of tablets is something that would have seemed inconceivable in the early days of Inventor. Fusion Production extends the reach of the product design functionality to fabrication on the shop floor. It will allow engineers to attach all the information to make a part to the design including the machining strategy, tooling sheets and all the other operations needed to finish it. This is a step towards consolidating all the design, manufacture and service data for a component into one, easily accessible cloud repository.

With both these technologies, the barriers to innovation and optimised delivery are falling away.

If you would like to know more about the changing nature of design and delivery in construction and manufacturing call us on  01784 419922 or email sales@cadline.co.uk