With so much aging infrastructure, particularly in the developed world, it’s lucky that the tools for managing large, multibillion dollar urban projects are not only available today, but more are in the pipe (so to speak).
This year’s Infrastructure keynote was devoted to showing how a variety of Autodesk® products, including some that are only available to Autodesk Subscription customers, can help large, diverse teams in multiple locations coordinate these complex projects. In particular they use them to:
- Perform storm and sanitary analysis
- Create civil visualizations
- Directly access ESRI data
Jay Bhatt, Senior Vice President, Autodesk AEC set the stage by highlighting some of the most important facts affecting infrastructure today—American infrastructure has been given a D rating by the American Society of Civil Engineers, and more than 2.2 TRILLION dollars is need over the next 5 years just to repair this ailing infrastructure.
Speakers Pete Southwood, Autodesk Technical Specialist, Geospatial and Utilities, and James Wedding, Technical Specialist, Civil Engineering, demonstrated how different Autodesk products could be used through all phases of a large water/wastewater project, and for setting up an optimum infrastructure for electric vehicle recharging stations.
The key was utilizing free GIS data to quickly put together project documents and presentations for these large projects.
One of the coolest demos? Using a combination of Autodesk MapGuide® and the new AutoCAD® WS, a free mobile app for iPhone®, iPad®, and iPod® touch to access and modify AutoCAD drawings across the web.
Other Subscription only products included an AutoCAD Civil 3D® visualization extension that lets you take your Civil 3D design and move it into Autodesk 3ds Max® so you can review your design virtually, and a tool to help you analyze pipe networks.
Paul McRoberts, Sr. Director, Infrastructure Modeling Product Line Group, closed the session by blasting through some of the upcoming tools that Autodesk has developed for Infrastructure, including Project Galileo, an easy-to-use planning tool for creating 3D city models from civil, geospatial and building data, and 3D models.
–sandy