ESRI - TwinGeo interview for the geospatial perspective

MARC GOLDMAN Director – Architecture, Engineering & Construction Industry SolutionsESRI USA

1. What role does GIS play in the construction sector? How does it benefit digital construction?

Location Intelligence applied to the Build phase, used by the construction professional, brings visibility to the best use of people, materials, equipment and supplies coming and going from the jobsite daily. Understanding the volume, velocity and schedule of materials on-site brings a valuable understanding of your project’s supply-chain and logistics challenges.

Location Intelligence offers a common view (from real-time visuals to historical context) of essential information to the team, whether in the office or on the jobsite. Team members get connected using familiar maps populated with workflow, personnel and asset data to orient and inform users.

As the physical work is completed, having been measured and tracked through a GIS based solution, the project’s Digital Handover is based on the project’s Digital Twin.

2. What are the benefits of integrating BIM with GIS?

The integration of BIM and GIS brings more efficiency to the entire lifecycle of a construction project. Using GIS enables people from different segments of the construction lifecycle to share a common picture of the project. GIS extends the value of digital BIM through visualization. Integration of BIM and GIS with time information, allows project participants to better understand the impacts of decisions before, during and after the construction of a project.

GIS is widely used for integrating, visualizing and analyzing information about real-world assets, such as buildings and transportation infrastructure, with surrounding context that may include environmental, demographic, structural, and scientific information. This kind of integration offers a perfect way to capitalize on BIM data. By bringing in the concepts of georeferencing and geodesign in BIM, the construction industry is preparing most effectively for the designs of the future. For example, GIS can provide insight about flood-prone areas and give designers accurate information to influence a structure’s location, orientation, and even construction materials.

3. How does GIS enable effective management of smart cities?

Smart communities are those that make the lives of their citizens better.. Smart communities understand that smart is a journey, not a destination, and with GIS technology they can solve for current challenges, rethink “business as usual” mindsets, and reimagine a community based on technological advances that support infrastructure needs, humans in crisis, climate change, and whatever else the future may bring. Smart communities embrace technology systems to:

• Support planning and engineering that adapts to change

• Improve operational efficiency

• Capitalize on data-driven performance to realize real-time awareness and response

• Achieve civic inclusion through engagement and an attention on social equity

Smart communities push aside politics and preconceptions in favor of data and analytics to make decisions. High-performing organizations are using location as the standard analytical approach to achieve new insight. Increasingly, smart devices, the internet of things and cloud computing are feeding data on the locations of people, nature, vehicles, and infrastructure.

4. There are still a section of people who feel that while BIM is best suited for managing data related to the building itself, GIS is more applicable for everything outside buildings. – Your thoughts on this.

The models created with BIM processes can be sophisticated enough to be created during Plan phase, evolved during Design to simulate and communicate, enriched during the Build phase allowing defects to be avoided and ongoing use during the Operate phase to optimize long-term use. The models are used to generate highly accurate simulations of schedule and budget compliance during the entire project lifecycle.

But to realize the full potential of BIM, the integration workflows between BIM and GIS must be brought together. Integration is critical to domains such as Smart Cities and Digitalized Engineering and Digital Twin delivery. From competing industries toward completing digitalized workflows that will allow us to disengage from centuries-old paper processes.

5. What are the major benefits of GIS over CAD?

In the 1980’s and 90’s, CAD and GIS emerged as competitors – two graphical solutions vying for professionals working with spatial data. CAD and GIS appeared to be overlapping versions of computerized tools for working with geometry and data to produce paper documentation. Whereas CAD systems initially focused on automating drafting tasks, Building Information Modeling (BIM), has pushed away from drawing creation toward intelligent digital models of real-world assets.

Likewise, GIS has also differentiated and become deeper in capability. GIS can now handle billions of events from live building sensors, serving visualizations from petabytes of 3D project data from a variety of reality capture methods. Interactive 2D and 3D visual environments comprised of CAD, BIM & GIS can be explored in a browser or mobile phone, and powered by complex predictive analysis performed in the cloud. The map and drawing, which started out as paper analytical tool have been transformed into a dashboard for synthesizing complex AEC analysis delivered in familiar and humaninterpretable form.

6. What are Esri’s latest offerings in the realm of digital construction & smart cities?

Esri is the leader in spatial thinking and pioneers the technology that helps governments of all sizes build smart communities and AEC companies Plan, Design, Build and Operate our world. Today, planning and engineering disciplines must balance the needs of people, infrastructure and the environment. Esri’s GIS-based systems allows governments to model the impacts of proposed development, adjust to shifting demographics and lifestyles, and account for changes in climate change and economic shifts.