For more than 30 years, the oil, gas and chemical process industries have successfully used virtual design and construction to ensure engineering and procurement specifications are in order, and all clashes are resolved before construction begins on the enormous, complex and expensive facilities the industry requires. But VDC, as a planning and construction management tool made necessary by the high stakes and great risks involved in the creation of the plants, turns out to be not enough. Plants are undergoing constant maintenance, refurbishment and change. Keeping on top of the activity and associated data is of vital importance to keep
Virtual design and construction tools are crossing over from buildings to transportation projects. Officials admit that 3D parametric modeling in the transportation sector has trailed the buildings sector, but they say change is afoot. “In 10 years, we will be living in a BIM world,” predicts Cosima Crawford, chief engineer for the New York City Transit Authority. “It’s our new reality,” she says.That reality has transportation teams tackling the same challenges their building counterparts are seeing in their transition to building information modeling. These include BIM technology issues, process change and institutional buy-in. Image: NYC Transit Authority For new projects,
Virtual design and construction is gaining ground in the utilities markets because of its ability to speed large-scale planning and development of energy projects. Though current applications on projects have just begun to touch the full potential of the approach, experienced users are enthusiastic about the financial benefits of debugging a project by building it first on the computer. Photo: Mortenson Mortenson uses VDC to layer environmental data, old-stump locations and grading plans for wind farm-site optimization. Photo: Bentley Bentley’s Substation V8i aids distribution planners with data modeling. Related Links: Digital-Modeling Veterans Want Data for Life Cycles Building Information Modeling
Construction industry firms and individuals who use social networking face confusion both about how to use the tools and how to measure success, according to research rolled out last month at the Society for Marketing Professional Services’ Build Business conference. Source: Society for Marketing Professional Services Foundation; based on Zoomerang® social networking survey of 576 members, conducted January 2009 Funded by SMPS Foundation, the open Internet-based survey was conducted between Jan. 30 and Feb. 15, netting 371 complete and 205 partial responses from SMPS members. Some respondents clearly confused electronic social networking with going to conferences or other offline networking
Social networking is coming to construction. So far, it is not a Twitter-like feed of 140 characters or less, nor is it free of charge. But it could be a highly useful tool to help firms engage each other more openly, cut risk and ease tension in a time of economic distress. One such innovator, Textura Corp., appropriately derives its name from the Latin words for “build” and “intertwine.” In just three years it has built a base of 38,000 users—and 25% of ENR Top 400 general contractors—into an innovative bill-pay site. Textura has turned the tedious business of bank
Hoping to quickly stake out digital territory, some construction industry firms are trying out the newest social media tools. After the initial rush of enthusiasm, they soon realize signing up for everything all at once may not exactly pay off. Eventually they were able to glean from their early experiences a thoughtful approach to these rapidly populating applications. Photo: HOK HOK brought bloggers from its international offices to its St. Louis headquarters for hands-on training. Todd Andrlik, vice president of marketing and public relations at Leopardo Companies, Hoffman Estates, Ill., says industry firms should consider why social media works, what
For more than 50 years, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration has extended the frontiers of human experience, with audacious landings on the moon, the research of Skylab, the far-seeing eye of Hubble and the reduction of space travel to something so routine a successful space-shuttle launch rates little more than a minute of the evening news. Now, NASA is exploring a frontier it has never encountered before: possible budget shortfalls. When NASA shuts down the shuttle program next year, astronauts wanting to do their part on the International Space Station will have to hitch a ride on a Russian
If technology’s worth comes from what you do with it, a new system leveraging digital pens and common printers to mate marks on paper with their authoring files may be valuable indeed. Slide Show ‘Plots’ contain a wealth of routing data. The tech bits are not new, but the workflow developed around them is. Bentley Systems Inc., Exton, Pa., announced ProjectWise Dynamic Plot V8i on May 27. When users of the ProjectWise content management and collaboration system use the dynamic plot option to print, a background pattern is produced on the paper. It is like a microscopic bar code on
A shiver went through the contractor world in mid-May after the product manager for Autodesk’s Constructware, a heavily used, hosted construction-project management tool, was quoted in an interview saying new feature development was being halted in a cost-cutting move, although the product would be maintained and supported. The statement, at first confirmed by Timothy Douglas, the company’s construction solutions manager—then reversed by Jay Bhatt, senior vice president of Autodesk’s AEC Industry Group—set off alarms across the industry. Some contractors and owners for whom Constructware is mission-critical for running big, multiyear projects, interpreted the comments as an indication San Raphael-based Autodesk’s
No one has misplaced Guantanamo Bay, but the half-century-old U.S. embargo on trade with Cuba has made the Communist-ruled island nation “terra incognita” on the world’s telecommunications map. The White House’s new policy of opening the door to travel and telecommunications links with Cuba could soon sketch in the country. Branching units on cables will permit connection to Cuba. “I think there’s a tremendous potential opportunity there,” says Tom Soja, Boston-based vice president of Ocean Specialists Inc., an engineer and contractor for subsea cables. Fiber-optic cables snake all around and through the Caribbean Sea and the Gulf of Mexico. But
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