By A. B (Buddy) Cleveland, Mark Smith, Bhupinder Singh

The architecture, engineering and construction (AEC) industry is globally a $3.4 trillion industry within which documentation is the basis for the delivery of products and services. This documentation is required to convey the large amount incredibly rich and diverse intellectual content created in the course of every AEC project. Today, it is almost universally true that this AEC content is created out of the minds of people through the use of information technology tools - computer-aided design, database applications, engineering analysis, word processing, and so on. Given its central importance to every project, electronically distributing, sharing, and collaborating on this AEC content is not only desirable, but today is an absolute necessity. However, the mere fact that AEC content exists in an electronic form is no guarantee that we can effectively distribute, share and collaborate on this content.

By it's very nature, AEC content is incredibly complex in that it's extremely rich and complex in both its information content. It exists in multiple and hybrid forms - it is not homogeneous. There's the multiple 2D & 3D CAD formats, raster and vector formats, intelligent and non-intelligent drawings, geospatial and schematic representations, and so on. Contributing to its richness is the fact that it is often created by trained professionals performing highly technical tasks.

It also includes a dense and complex network of relationships and dependencies that exist between all of the elements of the AEC content. There are relationships between files, relationships between components, relationships between components and files. These relationships are one-to-one, one-to-many, and many-to-many.

Finally, AEC Content is very dynamic and fragmented, changing rapidly throughout a project. During the design phase of a project, the content is in a constant stage of change by hundreds of parallel activities. The supply chain supporting an AEC project comes together in a matter of months; it exists for a year or so; and then disappears, never to be reconstituted in the exact same configuration again. Unlike other industries where supply chains are reasonably stable over time, the supply chains in place during the very critical design and build phase of an AEC project is virtually ad hoc by comparison.

From an IT (information technology) point of view, AEC content is difficult - it's difficult to manage; it's difficult to reuse; it's often difficult to communicate. Maximizing the return on the significant investment required to create AEC content means maximizing the effectiveness by which the content is distribute and shared. This means it needs to be accessible by all the appropriate people, it must be accurate, it must be timely and current, and it must be complete. The more useful, timely, complete, and easy to use the content is for the multitude of "consumers" of that content on any given project, the higher the return.

As a final consideration, increasing effectiveness means increasing both the "richness" and the "reach" of the documentation distributed throughout an AEC project. By "richness" we're referring to how much of the richness of the underlying AEC content is conveyed via the documentation. By "reach" we're referring to how far throughout the AEC project supply chain documentation in a particular form can be distributed. For example, if we were to consider a complex 3D model, integrating multiple disciplines with tentacles into the databases of multiple project functions, clearly this represents a high degree of richness. However, in order to take advantage of this richness typically requires high-end design software (i.e., the tools to interact with native formats), high-bandwidth connections to other applications, and so on. Only a few people within an AEC project, typically limited to the designers and engineers, have this kind of access, thus it's "reach" is very limited. On the other hand, a simple raster file has incredible "reach" - it can be posted on a web site, sent via e-mail, shipped overnight on a CD, and so on. On the other hand, since it's just a picture, its richness is very limited. You can't "drill down" behind a component in a drawing to query additional information and so on. Thus the challenge is to increase the richness of the documentation without diminishing the reach of traditional documentation.

There are many aspects in addressing this challenge. But perhaps one of the most fundamental aspects is that of format. In order to increase both the richness and reach, an electronic format requires the following characteristics:

Intelligent: The format must be capable of representing all the various formats - vector, raster, text, and so on - used to store AEC content in its native form. It must also be able to represent the multitude of relationships contained explicitly and implicitly within the AEC content. In a sense, it needs to "bind" together the hybrid AEC content into a single deliverable.

Compact: The format must be capable of storing all of this information very compactly so that it can be easily transmitted electronically, even over low bandwidth connections.

Secure: It must be possible to provide digital security so that it can be transmitted with the confidence only the right people can access the content and only those aspects of the content they are authorized to see.

Ubiquitous: Finally, the format must be ubiquitous, meaning that virtually everyone must be able to access and interact with this format without requiring installing of new software or, worse, requiring multiple software tools to access the documentation for different types of AEC content

Bentley has researched and experimented with many formats to document AEC content for a number of years, even some we've invented ourselves. The ultimate conclusion was to settle on an industry standard - Adobe's Portable Document Format (PDF). PDF is the de facto standard for secure and reliable distribution of electronic documents around the world. The PDF format preserves the fonts, images, graphics, and layout of documents and can be shared, viewed, and printed by anyone with the free Adobe Reader software. In addition to providing a secure and reliable way to distribute electronic documents, PDF enables applications to produce documents that are rich in content and easy to navigate. With over a half billion downloads of Adobe Reader, this certainly meets the criteria of being ubiquitous.

Bentley and Adobe have partnered with other software vendors under to the umbrella of "PDF for AEC" to further optimize the PDF to be even more effective for intelligent AEC documentation, support collaborative AEC workflows extending into operations and maintenance. PDF for AEC will address areas such as change management, improved navigation and discoverability of information, and continue to expand the native forms of AEC content that can be represented within PDF. According to Monica Schnitger of Daratech, "PDF is an excellent, information-rich format for project-level AEC information that is superior to paper drawings and many native file formats. Owners, designers, engineers, and others who need to share information for the creation and operation of AEC assets will benefit from the AEC-specific optimization Adobe and Bentley are detailing today."

Unlike other publishing formats, Adobe's Portable Document Format provides a container that is well suited for engineering information. PDF provides a framework for combining engineering drawings, specifications and other project information into a single document that can be shared with all project participants. It offers features that allow easy navigation from plan sheets to drawing details or specifications. It enables applications to include within the document attributes of parts or assemblies. In general terms, PDF enables publishing applications to create documents that are rich in content and easy to navigate. Content can include bookmarks and internal and external links for navigating information systems. PDF files can contain imbedded sound, movies and other content that can reduce errors and speed completion of AEC projects. Within the Bentley tools specifically, mechanisms are incorporated for creating intelligent PDF documentation at both the workstation and server levels, including seamless navigation between the PDF documents and AEC content managed by our server level products. Users will be able to create PDF documents containing integrated AEC content - drawings, specifications, component properties, and so on. These PDF documents are generated such that links between the content are automatically generated, such as links between drawings, drawings and specifications, plans & sections, individual components and specification sections, and so on. This also includes the capability to display changes between one revision of a drawing and another.

When it comes to AEC content, the challenge for AEC is create it once, manage it well, and publish it many times to individuals as well as other systems. Perhaps it's more simply put at "providing the right content, to the right people, at the right time." The "right content" means right scope, the right level of detail, and the right format. The "right people" refers to those that need it and those that have authorization, no matter where they are. And, the "right time" means delivering it automatically based on project milestones as well as whenever an AEC project member asks for it. As discussed here, meeting this challenge requires a number of tools among which a rich and ubiquitous format is fundamental. The Adobe PDF format and the PDF for AEC extension meet the requirements of both richness and ubiquity both now and in the future.

About the authors: Buddy Cleveland is a Director of CSRF. He can be reached at: buddy.cleveland@bentley.com. Mr. Smith and Mr. Singh can be reached at Bently Systems, Inc.www.bently.com.

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