Streamlining Infrastructure Workflow

Challenged with tight budgets, thinning profit margins, complex regulations and fierce competition, infrastructure providers are under increasing pressure to complete infrastructure projects on budget and on time. Organizations, both public and private, are responding to these trends by integrating their spatial information to provide complete visibility and reduce costs.

Organizations must electronically consolidate different kinds of data, including GIS, Civil, and CAD information, often stored in multiple sources and in various file formats. This data also typically lacks the precision and classifications required by infrastructure project teams because it was originally developed for other purposes. Even when project teams receive consolidated data, organizations often don’t have the tools they need to effectively utilize and share data with all team members throughout the entire project lifecycle.

Autodesk offers an integrated family of civil engineering and geospatial solutions that help customers address every phase in the lifecycle of critical infrastructure.

This article walks through the different phases of an infrastructure project, focusing on the planning, design, construction, and management processes, and illustrates how Autodesk streamlines workflow in and between each phase by:

• Unifying data so that team members can easily access, create, manipulate, view, and share accurate mapping, civil engineering, and design data, saving time and cutting costs.
• Providing rich functionality that enables project team members to leverage data fully both within and beyond the firewall.
With Autodesk solutions, organizations receive return on investment (ROI) improvements in each phase. Using Autodesk tools to manipulate data, conduct what-if analysis and scenario planning, easily revise project plans and designs, and share data with all team members, organizations also improve client and citizen satisfaction while staying on time and on budget.

Planning Phase

To streamline the planning phase of an infrastructure project, organizations must be able to import different data formats simply, clean up data from various sources automatically, and utilize data to support decision-making.

Consolidating data and ensuring that it is accurate is particularly important in the planning phase of an infrastructure project, because this phase provides the foundation for all subsequent phases.

Collect Geospatial Data

Because Autodesk solutions are interoperable with all major GIS software, mapping and geospatial professionals can simply import all necessary spatial data for the infrastructure project, access multiple databases and various source files simultaneously, as well as read, write, and transform industry-standard formats. Autodesk Map® 3D allows organizations to import major GIS data formats, such as ESRI® ArcView® SHP ,ESRI ArcInfo® coverages ,ESRI E00, MapInfo® MIF/MID™, MapInfo TAB , MicroStation® DGN™ , Generalized Markup Language (GML 2) and Ordnance Survey® MasterMap® . In addition, multiple geospatial databases— including Oracle 9i™, Oracle®10g, and ESRI ArcSDE® can be accessed simultaneously.

Leverage Geospatial Data

After importing and consolidating the data required for the project, it is time to clean it up and verify accurateness and appropriateness.
Traditionally, project team members have engaged in hours of tedious work to locate, fix, and redraw errors on maps, a time-consuming, costly practice that hampers efficient workflow. Autodesk solutions automate data cleanup, resulting in huge time and cost savings.
To streamline workflow, organizations must fully leverage data. For the planning stage, they can take advantage of Autodesk functionality that enables the creation of compelling thematic maps and reports that facilitate decision-making and planning actions in addition to allowing effective communication of the project plans to various
stakeholders.
Now all infrastructure project data is ready to be handed on to the design team to complete the next stage of the project: the design phase.

Design Phase

Because the design phase is by necessity an iterative process, it typically involves time-consuming activities. Organizations that implement a faster drawing process and adopt a more reliable model-based design process will immediately see significant return on their investment. Autodesk automates processes to facilitate collaboration, simplify design changes, ensure data accuracy, and help civil engineers
and designers choose the right design, so the design phase is streamlined and shortened, while errors are reduced.

Facilitate Collaboration

Unifying data in the design phase is a complex but critical endeavor. Many organizations face the challenge of maintaining design integrity. Members of the design team must collaborate closely, while also working independently on different aspects of the single design data model.
By leveraging an industry-proven dynamic engineering model, Autodesk® Civil 3D®
facilitates collaboration between team members and reduce
manual processes. This enables organizations to save time and reduce costs in the design phase. Design teams produce drawings more quickly and incorporate changes and other input to designs rapidly and accurately. They can also communicate designs easily to non-technical clients by using integrated 3D visualization tools.
The object-relational model creates intelligent relationships between design elements, so that they are related to, and aware of, each other. Projects can use a single reference model with change control mechanisms for design elements, drafting and reports, analysis, and 3D visualization. Several civil engineers can simultaneously reference surfaces, alignments, and profile data, and access these elements to create, edit, and manage other design elements, such as road models, pipe networks, and site
drawings. Project teams can share these core design elements through a project interface across multiple drawings.
Each drawing can then have different annotation and display views, allowing the design team to adhere better to company and client standards and submittal requirements.

Simplify Design Changes

The design phase is not a linear process, but rather an iterative, cyclic one. Based on client feedback, land use issues or any number of other factors, the team will need to make adjustments to the design as the project progresses. To facilitate this iterative process, organizations must eliminate time-consuming manual processes involved in making design changes.
With traditional design software, a change in the project may require an extensive amount of time to rework the drawings. This can happen numerous times in a project design cycle.
By using the engineering model that Autodesk solutions provide, any design change dynamically updates throughout the entire project. Designers no longer must manually update drawings. With Autodesk’s engineering model, drafting becomes a byproduct of the design. Thus, when there is a design change, not only does it propagate throughout the design, it also updates all the annotation and associated labels and tables as well. This saves the design team and the organization countless hours.

Ensure Design Accuracy

By dynamically propagating a design change throughout the project, including updates to profiles, sections, volumes, and quantity takeoffs, the engineering model reduces the need for manual redrafting and recalculating. This facilitates design accuracy and ensures that construction documentation is always in synch with the final design.

Optimize Design

Extending the value of design data in another way, Autodesk’s engineering model enables engineers to proliferate various “what-if” scenarios and easily create different design alternatives to optimize the final design. Using traditional software, it is simply not feasible to do this type of design manipulation while still meeting budgets and project timelines.
With Autodesk solutions, engineers can determine the most viable alternatives quickly and effectively, without spending valuable design cycles and time.
By creating multiple design iterations and what-if scenarios and communicating them in a visually compelling way to clients and approval boards, organizations can increase customer satisfaction.
To create an alternative design option, the designer simply moves or adds additional parameters and associated elements are recalculated dynamically. They can use integrated 3D visualization tools to visually consider and communicate other design alternatives.

Construction Phase

To support the construction phase, organizations need an efficient process for exchanging data to and between the construction site and the design office. Durimg the construction phase, data flow is improved and reviews are streamlined using Autodesk infrastructure solutions. Therefore projects are more efficient and budgets are maintained.

Improve Data Flow

Project team members, the design team, contractors, and clients all work from different locations, so it can be a challenge to exchange, review and modify design data efficiently.
Organizations unify and streamline data flow by enabling engineers to create construction documents in an immutable yet intelligent digital format, inspect details and take measurements onsite and easily exchange data between the construction site and design office.
With Autodesk solutions, engineers and technicians can take measurements and make notes on design drawings in the field using a mobile device, such as a Pen Tablet. The marked-up construction documents are then sent electronically to the designer, who incorporates changes into the design.

Streamline Reviews

Coordinating and preserving data integrity throughout reviews is especially challenging during the construction phase. Technicians in the field can be separated by long distances from the other team members.
Autodesk Infrastructure solutions provide powerful status tracking capabilities that enable to easily navigate through comments and incorporate changes.
This enables sharing of project data with all team members, internal and external, using the same data format that is used in the highly technical review process. Even if team members are in different locations, and regardless of whether users are collaborating using email, Internet or Autodesk Buzzsaw, data exchange is efficient.

Management Phase

To streamline the management phase, organizations must improve the flow and accessibility of their data. Autodesk enables GIS specialists to share project information effectively with the public, improving citizen satisfaction. Additionally, by helping organizations exchange information internally, Autodesk facilitates maintenance of the infrastructure asset once the project is complete.

Share Information

The management phase takes place both during and after construction and depends heavily on the efficient flow of unified data. During construction, organizations must share critical project information with all project members as well as their constituents.
By developing a project Website supported by Autodesk solutions, organizations can now communicate this information easily over the Internet.
In an easy-to-use Web environment, GIS specialists can present different project information, from large scale and detailed maps to topographical maps and designs. Users can access different levels of information detail and view various thematic presentations by zooming in on maps. In addition to making maps available, organizations can also show other project related information. Citizens and other
interested parties are able to simply search the site for relevant data.
With Autodesk MapGuide technology, it is possible to author and publish maps and design information quickly and easily for distribution internally or on the web. MapGuide improves productivity and reduces the costs of integrating and distributing maps and designs. An open source version of Autodesk MapGuide Enterprise is available, hosted by the Open Source Geospatial Foundation.

Facilitate Infrastructure Maintenance

After the construction phase of the project, organizations must exchange information internally to manage the infrastructure maintenance. Leveraging the same Web environment, a GIS specialist can present information that facilitates maintenance.
Autodesk® solutions include an infrastructure asset management solution, Autodesk Topobase™, that provides centralized, flexible, and secure access to spatial information for planning, design, operations and business teams. Built on Autodesk Map 3D, Autodesk MapGuide, and Oracle software, Topobase helps you see the big picture and make better decisions by integrating CAD, map, asset, GIS and customer information for a more comprehensive view of your infrastructure

Conclusion

By improving data flow and reducing manual processes throughout all phases of an infrastructure project, Autodesk helps organizations save time, cut costs, and improve client and constituent satisfaction.
Autodesk, Civil 3D, Autodesk Map, Autodesk Topobase, Buzzsaw and Autodesk MapGuide are registered trademarks or trademarks of Autodesk, Inc., in the USA and other countries. All other brand names, product names, or trademarks belong to their respective holders.