Eutech Cybernetic uses Forge for BIM-powered Visualization and Data Management in its iviva Smart-building Solution

Headquartered in Singapore and with additional operations in India, Dubai, Sri Lanka and Sydney, Eutech Engineering Pte. Ltd. and its subsidiaries (the "Group") develop and implement proprietary software solutions for workplace management, smart buildings, and healthcare. Eutech has accumulated domain knowledge and experience over more than 15 years through the deployment of smart building and hospital management software systems. Eutech is also an Autodesk Forge partner.

Autodesk Forge is our application program interface (API) platform and supporting materials (sample code, manuals) as well as a community of developers who uses those APIs. Although Forge is intended for our customers and 3^rd party developers to be able to use our web services, we use Forge for our development of the cloud-based services that we offer. You can leverage Forge in the same ways that we do.

This Eutech Cybernetic story comes to us from the Forge team. Eutech Cybernetic turned to the Forge platform to incorporate BIM-powered visualization and data management into its smart-building solution. Eutech develops software solutions that harness the power of Building Information Modeling (BIM) to enable smarter buildings, airports, and workplaces. Its core offering, called iviva, turns 3D models into dashboards that make building operations easier and more intuitive to manage.

Forge is defined by 7 groups of APIs:

• Authentication
• Design Automation API
• Reality Capture API
• Data Management API
• Model Derivative API
• Viewer
• Webhooks API

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The iviva solution makes use of 4 of them:

• Authentication

  Authentication for Forge is based on the industry standard OAuth, specifically OAuth2, that provides for token-based authentication and authorization. For Eutech Cybernetic, the basic flow for using OAuth is:

  1. The Eutech iviva app makes an HTTP call to an OAuth REST (REpresentational State Transfer) endpoint and provides its credentials.
  2. A token is returned to the app.
  3. In making subsequent HTTP calls to various APIs on the platform, Eutech iviva includes the token in a request header.

• Viewer

  For more than a decade, Eutech tried with varying degrees of success to tie equipment, devices, and operational processes for buildings to as-built models. The goal was to create a visual and intuitive interface for building operations by eliminating expensive integration and bespoke user interfaces, but bringing reliable file viewing to life proved challenging. For one thing, building model files tended to be very large and slow to load. Plus, many file types were used to design buildings and supporting multiple file formats took too much developer time — that Eutech preferred to spend developing innovative capabilities that could make building operations smarter.

  In a search for a solution to the viewing issue, Eutech discovered the Forge Viewer not only supported Revit building design software — one of the most widely used BIM design tools — but it also offered a way to view more than 50 different industry-standard formats. Just as importantly, the Viewer was lightweight and handled large BIM files easily.

  The Viewer is a WebGL-based, JavaScript library for your use in 3D and 2D model rendering. The Viewer communicates natively with the Model Derivative API to fetch model data, complying with its authorization and security requirements. The Viewer requires a WebGL-canvas compatible browser:

  • Chrome 50+
  • Firefox 45+
  • Opera 37+
  • Safari 9+
  • Microsoft Edge 20+
  • Internet Explorer 11

• Model Derivative API

  The Model Derivative API lets Eutech iviva represent and share designs in different formats, as well as to extract valuable metadata into various object hierarchies. 50 different file input formats are supported. With this API, Eutech iviva can translate designs into different formats, such as STL and OBJ, but the key one is that programmers can have it translate designs into SVF for extracting data and for rendering files in the Viewer.

  The Forge Model Derivative API added to the platform's value by playing a role in a process that Eutech developed to automate the implementation of smart building by using BIM's metadata.

• Data Management API

  The Data Management API gives Eutech programmers a unified and consistent way to access data across BIM 360 Team, Fusion Team, BIM 360 Docs, and its own Object Storage Service. The Object Storage Service allows Eutech iviva to download and upload raw files (such as PDF, XLS, DWG, or RVT).

  More recently, Eutech has begun to use the Data Management API to access files and data stored in BIM 360 Docs. With Forge providing key capabilities, the Eutech iviva solution delivers an efficient way to link BIM models to building equipment and spaces. Eutech iviva also lets users automate many of the steps involved in taking BIM to operations, speeding the implementation process. The result is a digital twin that supports operational processes such as incident management, equipment monitoring and control, and more. With the iviva solution, building operators manage smart buildings using a visual interface. Using iviva has not only reduced costs by increasing maintenance and energy efficiency — it's also helped enhance security and occupant comfort more automatically.

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Autodesk has always been an automation company, and today more than ever that means helping people make more things, better things, with less; more and better in terms of increasing efficiency, performance, quality, and innovation; less in terms of time, resources, and negative impacts (e.g., social, environmental). Autodesk Forge is an integral part of our automation plans, and Eutech iviva demonstrates that point.