Attend a conference about AEC or infrastructure and you’ll hear a lot of talk about connecting BIM and GIS. It makes sense that this would be high on the industry’s want list: Every structure is situated in geography, and (nearly) every geographical space holds a number of structures. That means BIM and GIS are natural bedfellows, which makes it frustrating that they haven’t been better integrated by major software vendors.
If you agree, I have good news. At Autodesk University last week, president and CEO Andrew Anagnost took to the stage with Esri’s president Jack Dangermond to announce “the start of a new relationship to build a bridge between BIM and GIS mapping technologies.”
The effect of this bridge, the two companies say, is that structures from houses and schools to roads and energy networks “no longer need to be planned, designed, and built in isolation of everything around it. Instead, planners and designers can better view infrastructure projects in relation to how those assets fit and interact with the surrounding ecosystem.”
The implications of this technological bridge between the two technologies are too broad for a simple overview, but the two companies did note some more or less tangible benefits. By synthesizing information from BIM and GIS systems, users will gain “unprecedented” reductions in permitting time, enhanced project insight, improved sustainability, and “reduced risk via improved end-to-end flow of materials, resource availability and scheduling during construction.”
For more information, see Autodesk and Esri’s collaboration page.
