VINCI Facilities

VINCI Facilities helps building owners in Europe and Morocco manage their facilities more efficiently. The company’s customers come from a variety of public and private sectors, and they all strive to provide comfortable, sustainable buildings. To further that goal, the software development team at VINCI Facilities created a facility management software system based on BIM (Building Information Modeling) that delivers actionable insights into building operations. Called TwinOps, the software system debuted in early 2019, wowing the building operators who use it. Facility managers can turn to TwinOps to view and manage their buildings as 3D models. The models bring together a wealth of design and equipment data, providing managers with an operational dashboard for buildings. Occupants report problems and generate maintenance requests that precisely identify issue locations. Maintenance staff use augmented reality viewers to “see” systems behind walls and ceilings, helping them address issues faster and with less disruption. Buildings owners turn to the software system for analysis that identifies ways that they can operate equipment more efficiently and sustainably.

Challenge

VINCI Facilities wanted to bring the intelligent data contained in 3D construction models into facility management. The company also saw an opportunity to integrate temperature and equipment performance sensors into 3D building models, enabling smart buildings. Tasked with delivering on this vision, the software development team began to create a facility management system designed to help facility managers use BIM and sensors to operate buildings more intelligently. They decided that the system needed to support inputs from the wide array of data and file types used in building design and management.

How VINCI Facilities solved it with Forge

VINCI Facilities realized that its system required fast, lightweight viewing of models. But the team didn’t want to waste time developing and supporting a viewer. Early in their development process, the team explored available viewer options. There were several contenders, including the Forge Viewer. Eliminating other viewers as too limited, the team chose Forge for its support for more than 60 CAD file formats. After making the choice, the team looked more deeply at the other Forge APIs, and decided to use the APIs to streamline their development efforts. The Model Derivative API extracts metadata from models and optimizes data outputs for the Viewer. To make room-based information readily usable in the software system, the team is taking advantage of the Design Automation API. With the time saved by using Forge APIs, the team has been able to devote more effort to adding unique value to TwinOps, including creating analysis tools that help optimize equipment performance.

Forge highlights include the following:

• Using time saved to develop analysis tools that improve equipment performance by as much as 15%
• Connecting building operators and occupants to real-time visualizations of building data from models and sensors
• Cutting the time it takes to find and fix maintenance issues by 30%

APIs and Services

Design Automation API for Revit

Model Derivative API

Viewer