Software
Esri ArcGIS GeoBIM At Autodesk University in 2021, the most interesting product announcement wasn’t from Autodesk, but from GIS (Geographic Information System) developer Esri. After four years of development, the Esri-Autodesk Partnership has finally delivered its first offspring
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t Autodesk University in 2017, Autodesk CEO Andrew Anagnost and Esri president and co-founder Jack Dangermond sat on the mainstage to announce that the firms would be working together to build a bridge between AEC and GIS and, more specifically, between BIM and GIS. The initiative was a genius combination of effort from the world’s biggest AEC and GIS software houses. The aim was to work together to better integrate their respective technologies, sharing APIs, and to develop integrated workflows between their products, as well as doing some joint development. In October 2021, Esri finally announced ArcGIS GeoBIM, the first product based on the agreement, fusing Esri’s ArcGIS mapping service with Autodesk cloud-based BIM data. For those that don’t know Esri, it’s the
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global leading mapping and spatial analytics firm. The company’s flagship application is called ArcGIS, which is a server and online GIS system. It was originally launched in 1999 under the Arc/Info brand. While Autodesk once dabbled in mapping, with AutoCAD Map (and Map 3D), it has never really held any serious pretentions to getting into the professional GIS space, with the two firms keeping to their own markets. With convergence, accelerated by digitisation and an increasing appetite for spatial data, the partnership made perfect sense. Even before the announcement of the partnership, Esri had delivered a free plug-in for AutoCAD in 2014 called ‘ArcGIS for AutoCAD’, which brought maps, imagery, and geographic features from ArcGIS into the AutoCAD drawing environment. However, with the widespread adoption of BIM and 3D, and
the rise of digital twins and city scale modelling, Esri has pursued a development strategy to get its tools to play better with BIM data.
Linking BIM and GIS Esri ArcGIS GeoBIM links projects and workflows by interconnecting Esri ArcGIS with the Autodesk Construction Cloud and / or Autodesk BIM 360. Within the application, users create GeoBIM projects, which combine ArcGIS features with Autodesk records, mutually served over the cloud and delivered in a lightweight 3D viewing application, powered by Autodesk Forge. GeoBIM offers filtering, analytics and query tools. Autodesk Construction Cloud and BIM 360 hosts data created in AutoCAD, AutoCAD Civil 3D and Revit. In many respects this is one of the first applications we have seen which blends cloud services from two significant vendors, to deliver a new and unique service. GeoBIM displays ArcGIS infrastructure layers and building scene layers, alongside the corresponding Revit model, displayed side by side for coordination. GeoBIM ‘apps’ can be run on the loaded datasets, including: documentation, site context evaluation, progress review and design and construction coordination. There is also an ‘issues’ dashboard, where project managers can monitor project progress. One of Esri’s examples showed that, while you can link single projects, you can also look at a portfolio of assets, making connections to multiple BIM projects within Autodesk Construction Cloud. Here the dashboard can give you progwww.AECmag.com
03/02/2022 15:42
