Bentley’s BE Conference 2008

Towards the end of May, I headed out to Baltimore to attend Bentley’s annual user event, the BE Conference (the “BE” stands for Bentley Empowered). Except for last year’s conference, I have been attending this event every year since 2004, and I find it a terrific opportunity to learn more about Bentley’s products and what its users are doing. This year, the conference had a new format that focused more on user presentations and stories than on training sessions, which made it much more relevant for me as well as to those who attended it to get a better idea of how Bentley solutions were being used. The conference has averaged an attendance of about 2000 in the past few years, and this was true for the 2008 event as well. What was different, however, was the growing international presence—among the attendees, the media, as well as the projects show-cased at the annual BE awards and the user presentations. The company has already diversified from four core verticals—Civil, Building, Plant, and Geospatial—to many more categories, including Bridges, Buildings, Cadastre and Land Development, Campuses, Communications, Electric and Gas Utilities, Factories, Mining and Metals, Oil and Gas, Power Generation, Rail and Transit, Roads, and Water and Wastewater. It has over 100 products in its portfolio, and these are being used on some of the biggest infrastructure projects around the world. Anyone in any doubt about the long-term viability of Bentley’s products would find those doubts laid to rest after attending BE 2008. The next release of the Bentley solutions, supposed to be their biggest ever, also looked very promising, going by the sneak peeks of some of the features that were shared.

Each of the different solution areas that Bentley caters to had its own track at the BE conference. I attended the one most relevant to AEC, “BIM and Beyond,” which featured close to 30 concurrent sessions on a wide range of topics including BIM implementation, integrated design and engineering, BIM in construction, sustainable design, interoperability, and next generation facilities management, as well as product overviews of all the Bentley BIM solutions. The highlights of the sessions I attended are captured in this issue of the AECbytes Newsletter, along with the product announcements made at the general sessions, the BE Awards, and some of the relevant products on display at the Exhibit Hall.

General Session Keynotes

The theme of this year’s BE conference was “Best Practices for Sustaining Infrastructure,” which was hardly a surprise given that sustainability and green design are currently the hottest buzzwords not only in the AEC industry but across all other fields and industries. To this end, Bentley had invited Andrew Winston to deliver the guest keynote address, who is a recognized expert on green business and the co-author of the book, Green to Gold: How Smart Companies Use Environmental Strategy to Innovate, Create Value, and Build Competitive Advantage. Sustainability was also the focus of several of the executive keynotes, including those by CEO Greg Bentley, by Ed Mueller, Bentley’s new Chief Marketing Office, and by Buddy Cleveland, Senior VP of Bentley’s Applied Research Group, who has also recently published a white paper on the subject entitled Sustaining Infrastructure. Most of these presentations were focused on the topic of sustainability in general rather than in the specific context of the AEC industry and Bentley’s Building Solutions, and they are beyond the scope of this article to cover. If you are interested, you can watch the recordings of these keynote sessions that are posted on Bentley’s BE 2008 website.

The discussion turned more specifically to Bentley solutions in the keynote presentation by CTO Keith Bentley who talked about a different aspect of sustainability than the one related to the environment we most commonly hear about. He discussed sustainability in the context of software, and more specifically about what Bentley is doing to make its software more sustainable for users. The challenges that the infrastructure industry faces from a software perspective include long timelines for the projects, large datasets, heterogeneous data types, complex workflows, IP protection, and liabilities. In order to meet these challenges in a sustainable manner, the software needs to be correctly designed, comprehensive, extensible, scalable, and adequately supported. All of these have formed the key considerations for Bentley in the development of its software. It is designed in layers, so that it can support a wide variety of design applications with the more discipline-specific layers at the top. The data model is federated rather than centralized so as to better support distributed data. Interoperability is considered critical and is achieved by supporting open standards such as the IFC, publishing to standard formats such as PDF, by direct read/write of popular formats such as DWG, and connecting with applications through APIs. Bentley is continuing to extend the scope of its solutions through several acquisitions—in the last 4 years, it has acquired over 40 companies across the different fields it caters to. Its key acquisitions in the AEC field include RAM and STAAD for structural analysis that it acquired a couple of years ago, and two that were announced more recently—Hevacomp for energy analysis and building services design, and Common Point for construction simulation. On the support front, Bentley has greatly expanded its online training resources and is offering companies with an ETS (enterprise training subscription) program to easily access all its training content. It has also launched a new BE Communities website that includes forums, blogs, a wiki, and galleries of files and images that can allow its users to connect, communicate, and learn from each other. 

We got a glimpse of some of the new features of the next release of Bentley solutions, dubbed Athens, in the keynote presentation by Bhupinder Singh, Senior VP of Bentley Software. The demos were focused on five key areas: conceptual design, geo-coordination, distributed projects, dynamic views, and interoperability. For conceptual design, the Athens release will incorporate features such as Push/Pull to make modeling easier and more intuitive, and integrate the use of GenerativeComponents to make its rule-based form-making capability more accessible to everyone rather than just a select group of advanced users. Distributed projects will be better supported by building scalability right into the product, with new techniques such as caching and delta file transfer, where only the changes are detected and sent rather than the entire file. Also included will be a Web Edit server and a Web View server powered by Microsoft’s SharePoint technology. Dynamic views refers to several new features such as automatic creation and update of section views, real time shadows, different displays for cuts, and the ability to render different parts of the model in different modes. Along the interoperability front, the Athens release has several PDF enhancements such as the ability to search for metadata, links from the objects to specifications, rich object properties, and saved views. A new ProjectWise Navigator application has been introduced for visual collaboration, review, and analysis, which includes capabilities for clash detection, walking through the model, and measuring and querying objects.

The demonstrations of the individual features of the Athens release were accompanied by demos showing their application in different industries. For AEC, this included a demo of the integrated design and documentation of a high-rise concrete building, where the 3D model was created in Bentley Structural and the analytical model imported in STAAD.Pro to optimize the design as well as the reinforcement. Some of the components of the structure were designed in more detail in other applications, and the data was able to be seamlessly moved from the STAAD model into these applications: for example, the floor data was moved to RAM Concept where post-tensioning was added to the slabs to reduce the cost without compromising on safety; the same was done for the footing design in STAAD.foundation. Once the design had been finalized using all these analysis tools, all the analysis information was brought back into the model, from where it could be published to 3D PDF for review, published to Google Earth to understand thermal loads and apply geothermal data, used by the design team to generate construction documents, and used by detailers to design further details such as rebar in a detailing tool like ProStructures. Another demo focused on showing BIM and GIS integration where a new project had to be created from an older building that was available as a Revit file. The Athens release has a plug-in to import a Revit model, which would be deployed in this case bring the model into the Bentley BIM suite and try to re-use the material from the older building that had to be demolished. This information could be automatically entered into LEED calculation sheets to determine the credits for re-use. The geospatial integration would allow the design to be analyzed in the context of the actual site, and a gbXML file could be created for preliminary analysis in Green Building Studio (now part of Autodesk). For a more comprehensive energy analysis, the recently acquired Hevacomp would be used. Lighting analysis would be done with the Visual suite of tools from Acuity Brands, and this information could be round-tripped back into the BIM model.

All of these features and enhancements sound very promising, and must be keenly awaited by Bentley users. Bentley is working feverishly on getting the Athens release ready by Q4 of this year, with development work happening around the clock in 17 countries across the world. We will take a more detailed look at the Athens versions of the Bentley BIM solutions as soon as they are released.

The “BIM and Beyond” Solutions Track

As mentioned earlier, the “BIM and Beyond” track featured close to 30 sessions on various topics including BIM implementation, integrated design and engineering, BIM in construction, sustainable design, interoperability, and next generation facilities management, in addition to product overviews of the different solutions in Bentley’s Building portfolio. This was accomplished by keeping the sessions short (30 to 45 minutes) and focused. A brief overview of some of the sessions I was able to attend is presented here.

In a session entitled “Surfing the BIM Transformation,” Alan Edgar, known for his work on NBIMS (see his AECbytes article on this topic), talked from the vantage point of his new role in the organization OSCRE (Open Standards Consortium for Real Estate) and discussed some of the upcoming trends in the facilities industry, given new technologies such as BIM, economic drivers, and environmental challenges. These trends include the unification of building, location, and commerce, the need for buildings to be highly adaptable to change, the ubiquity of broadband networks, buildings that are carbon-neutral and generate no waste, model-driven certification of codes, and on-demand design collaboration using an open-format model server. He gave an interesting analogy of the domain of online flight bookings where all the travel sites share the same database, and posited that we need the same for buildings. He also suggested we find ways to pass model views back and forth instead of the model itself, and made a pitch for NBIMS and BuildingSMART, encouraging firms to invest some of their profits to support the development of standards and help the industry move forward more quickly on the BIM-fueled transformation.   

In another session presented by Stuart Bull of Arup, we learnt more the firm’s work on the Sydney Opera House’s Opera Theatre renovation project using BIM, for which the firm received an Honorable Mention in the “Jury's Choice” category in the 2007 TAP BIM Awards. The renovation involved adding new architectural and structural elements, new mechanical services, and a new underground tunnel. One of the key factors driving the use of BIM in the project was its complex geometry. BIM was extremely useful in visualizing the existing geometry and the proposed changes. The model was also very useful for the acoustical analysis which is so critical in the design of a theatre. The team has gone further and meta-tagged all the objects in the model, so that everything can be quantified and searched. The model literally works as the window to the complete database of the project and all its components. The model was also exported via IFC to ArchiCAD to serve as input to the FM tools that are being used to manage the facility and its operations.

Tim Williams of the Building Design Partnership (BDP), Europe's largest interdisciplinary design firm, presented a session describing an initiative labeled “Concept Information Modeling” or CIM that has been launched at his firm. BDP has been deploying BIM technologies for several years which have led it to develop new strategies to further exploit the benefits offered by BIM. CIM refers to the modeling of the project and its context at the early stage of a design, which allows critical design decisions to be tested at the time they matter most, especially with regard to environmental issues. Many of BDP’s projects are large scale towers and complexes, which requires the firm to think of the relationship between the buildings and the urban spaces they inhabit. It uses tools such as Ecotect (which Autodesk has just acquired) for daylighting analysis and testing the thermal behavior of buildings on a site. It also uses acoustical analysis tools to take into consideration aspects such as street noise, barriers, and so on. In short, it evaluates all the criteria that will determine how well a building fits into the site, leading to the creation of better quality and more sustainable urban environments.

Sustainability was also the focus of the session presented by Drury Crawley of the US Department of Energy (DOE), who shared some of the ideas that his organization was coming up with for low-energy buildings. These include organic dynamic building envelopes, dynamic personalized ventilation that is decoupled from a building’s air conditioning system, individual controls for thermal comfort, use of daylighting and LED lights to minimize lighting energy, use of waste materials and organic composites for building, recycling water for re-use, use of sensors for efficient use of energy resources, looking at entire lifecycle costs rather than short-term costs only, and renovating existing buildings as much as possible instead of constructing new ones. Buildings currently account for 40% of energy consumption in the US and 40% of CO2 emissions, and these numbers are growing faster compared to other sectors such as transportation. But the good news is that both economic and environmental drivers are in place to improve the situation. In addition to mandatory codes, voluntary metrics such as LEED that go beyond the minimum are gaining momentum. Also, legislations are already in place to provide tax credits for meeting energy standards, and significant new legislations can be expected later this year. Building simulation using BIM and analysis tools is the key to achieving low energy buildings, and it should be used to inform decisions at all stages of the design, especially early on when the most critical decisions are made. At the same time, it should be kept in mind that building simulation is still more of an art than a science, and what should be taught is the methodology rather than the tool. The session ended with a brief overview of EnergyPlus, the building simulation tool developed by DOE, which can be freely downloaded from www.energyplus.gov.

It was apt to follow this up with a session that provided some details about Hevacomp, the building mechanical design software that Bentley has recently acquired. Presented by Nigel Bird of Bentley, this session touched upon the key capabilities of the application, including how to define the building geometry and other settings. Hevacomp is not yet integrated with BIM, which means that the building model needs to be created within the application. This can be done by tracing over 2D drawings or using another 3D model as a reference. Over and above the building geometry, it is other parameters and attributes such as materials, opening types, site and climate data, controls, etc. that are key to using the application effectively. Once these are defined, different building configurations can be easily analyzed and compared to each other. In addition to its core capabilities of HVAC design, Hevacomp provides a link to EnergyPlus, which allows the project data that has already been set up for load calculations and pipe and duct design to be gainfully used for energy analysis and simulation.

There were a number of sessions related to the use of BIM in construction. One of them was by Michael LeFevre of Holder Construction, whose firm is seeing an exponential rate of growth thanks to its BIM implementation for coordination and clash detection. Sometimes, it goes further and provides models for facilities management to the owner. It is still getting mostly drawings from the architects it works with and it uses them to create its own BIM models. LeFevre shared several examples of his firm’s BIM work on various projects, all of which have led to substantial cost and time savings. The AGC (Association of General Contractors) is moving very fast on popularizing BIM among contractors by providing classes and developing education and certification programs. This follows its 2006 initiative at providing a handbook on BIM to contractors (see the AECbytes article, The AGC's BIM Initiatives and the Contractor's Guide to BIM), which has been extremely helpful.

Another construction-related session was presented by Dan Klancnik of The Walsh Group/Archer Western Contractors, who showed how they used Bentley’s BIM solutions on the $75 million Arizona CAP expansion project. They invested about 40K on the software, and achieved savings of over 150K thanks to zero change orders and zero re-work, showing that it takes only one project to achieve ROI on BIM. In addition to its most common use for clash detection, BIM helped in many other ways: for design validation, to get the owner’s feedback on spaces for operation and accessibility; to review constructability; to do quantity take-off easily without tedious manual counting; to calculate cut and fill on the site; to reduce over-ordering of materials, avoiding waste and unnecessary transport and storage costs; and for site layout and planning, which also improved safety conditions on the site for construction workers.

We also heard from Samir Emdanat of GHAFARI Associates, an A/E firm that is well known for being on the cutting edge of BIM implementation (see the AECbytes article, Multi-Disciplinary BIM at Work at GHAFARI Associates) and has won several awards including one of the TAP BIM Awards in 2006. Having successfully used BIM on several automotive plant projects, the firm is now using the same ideas on other project types including a 10 storey hotel building and a courthouse project for the GSA. It continues to work closely with fabricators, overlaying their models on the design model to detect inconsistencies, and tries to compress and streamline each workflow, including design. In addition to BIM, it makes extensive use of Bentley’s server-based collaboration and management application, ProjectWise, to allow distributed teams to collaborate and access the data, including the field workers on the construction site.

The final “BIM and Beyond” session that I attended focused on the next generation of facilities management and it was presented by Lari Anderson of BAE Systems. The firm is working on an initiative dubbed NextGen-Facilities, based on the recognition that BIM needs to go beyond the first cost of design and construction and be effectively used for reducing the lifecycle cost of a building. The structure of a building does not change for 30 to 40 years, but the space use changes every 3 to 7 years and the infrastructure needs to be replaced every 10 to 20 years. When a building is first built, it usually operates as intended, but over time, its performance declines as the systems start wearing down. All the data from the various devices in a building does not get collated and mined to make it operate more efficiently. This lack of systems integration produces legacy building systems that operate in silos. We need some new professional roles in AEC: a Master Systems Integrator who is involved in the initial design/construction team with the A/E and contractor; and a ongoing Building Manager and Systems Integrator throughout the operation phase. BAE is working with Cisco Systems to develop some automated tools for facilities management and systems integration that work by integrating BIM with information related to occupants, devices, and systems. So, for instance, a building would be smart enough to know who is in the building and what their roles are. When an employee enters the building using their security card, this information goes both to the HR department for time tracking as well as to their individual office location, kicking off the heating and cooling system. Essentially, the idea is to bring IT and building management together with the help of BIM. The NextGen-Facilities concept has some similarity with the “Building Information Network” or BIN concept that was presented at the recent AIA TAP conference by Cisco and Burt Hill, and I found it just as fascinating.

Other Conference Highlights

As in previous BE conferences, the BE Awards of Excellence were a major highlight of the show, presented in an Oscar-like fashion at a special evening dinner ceremony. Seventeen projects across various infrastructure industries won awards in the professional categories, selected from over 250 nominations. Three of these were in the Building industry, and they include: Arup for its Melbourne Stadium project in the Innovation in Commercial or Residential Building category; GHAFARI Associate and General Motors Corporation for using Integrated Project Delivery using ProjectWise and BIM in the Innovation in Industrial Facilities category; and the Port of Long Beach for its CAS/GIS Project Plan in the Innovation in Military Installations, Campuses, and Airports category. In addition to the professional awards, there were academic awards for student projects, an Educator of the Year award that went to Peter Glaudemans of the Eastern Technical High School, and a Lifetime Achievement Award that was presented to John (Jack) Hallman of General Motors Corporation.

The Exhibit Floor at the BE conference showcased various products from Bentley and other vendors that work with Bentley solutions. HP was a big presence, showing its new Blade Workstation Solution which gives users the ability to quickly and seamlessly access workstation computing power from anywhere using thin client devices or Windows-based workstations, PCs and notebooks. The main blade workstation resides in the data center and executes all the user applications. Special configurations are available to deliver maximum performance for AEC applications, with one or more dual- or quad-core processors and high-end graphics cards. A key component of the solution is the HP Remote Graphics Software, which transmits 3D images many times per second from the Blade Workstation to the user’s desktop, so that the experience of running an application remotely is virtually indistinguishable from running it locally. HP also showed its Performance Tuning Framework, which enables optimal configuration of HP Personal Workstations by guiding the system setup to allow a "custom" configuration that best matches the workstation to user requirements. This customization ensures availability of the latest graphics cards and drivers and removes some memory restraints. It has an extensible design that permits new configuration functionality and application support to be easily integrated over time. The Framework also automatically updates itself when newer versions become available.

Other exhibitors included the German-based ITandFactory, which provides the TRICAD suite of applications for building services engineering that integrate with Bentley’s MicroStation products; CADsmart, which provides software that firms can use to assess the skills of their CAD teams and potential new hires; PTC, which showed its Mathcad engineering calculation software that lets engineers design and document engineering calculations simultaneously with comprehensive applied math functionality and dynamic, unit-aware calculations; A/E Data Integration, Inc., which provides facility information management and technical services to the facility planning, design, construction, commissioning, and facility management industries; and ZCorp, which showed its wide range of 3D printers for creating physical models directly from computer models created with applications such as Bentley’s MicroStation.

An additional highlight of the conference relevant to AEC was in the closing session, which showcased a number of infrastructure projects that have used Bentley solutions. One of the projects that was discussed was the Dubai Mall, which is part of the famous Downtown Burj Dubai complex. It is scheduled to open this August, and when completed, it will supposedly be the largest mall in the world. One of the firms involved in the project is CCC (Consolidated Contractors Company), the largest engineering and construction company in the Middle East with over 140,000 employees. The discussion centered on the benefits that CCC had derived from using BIM for quantity surveying (QS) alone. The Dubai Mall project has 32 buildings, and the traditional QS process would have been too tedious—it would have required about 32,000 spreadsheets and 75 man-years to determine the quantities needed. Instead, CCC developed an automated BIM-based QS process, where a BIM model of the complex was created using Bentley solutions and APIs and VBA were used to generate QS reports on demand. It required the use of only 2 onsite BIM engineers and resulted in manpower savings of over $7 million. There were also substantial savings in materials—for concrete alone, the estimated savings in waste reduction was $3 million. The other benefits that were derived from the use of BIM included better accuracy and quality, and better visualization of construction. This has led CCC to plan on an extended use of BIM for other aspects of its future projects as well, including architecture, engineering, and MEP.

Conclusions

As always, attending the BE Conference was a valuable experience for me, providing a first-hand look at what Bentley has in store going forward. The upcoming Athens version looks very promising, and I hope it will go a long way towards reducing the complexity and improving the user-friendliness of Bentley’s solutions, which has continued to remain its most critical limitation so far. It was also heartening to see the realm of Bentley’s solutions expanding to cover many more disciplines and industries, ensuring the long-term viability of the company—always a critical factor to firms as they consider which solutions to invest in and deploy. I enjoyed the new format of the BE conference, and found it commendable that so many of the sessions were on broader topics rather than just focused on the use of Bentley solutions, providing plenty of insights and food for thought, not just for Bentley users but for anyone interested in learning about new technologies and their application. The only downside was the tight schedule devised to accommodate all the sessions, which didn’t leave any time for audience Q&A. Hopefully, Bentley will do some tweaking to next year’s event to fix this problem. The Athens version will long be out by then, and it should be extremely interesting to see what impact the new release has had by that time.

About the Author

Lachmi Khemlani is founder and editor of AECbytes. She has a Ph.D. in Architecture from UC Berkeley, specializing in intelligent building modeling, and consults and writes on AEC technology. She can be reached at lachmi@aecbytes.com.

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