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This week's Industry News section highlights the recent release of AVEVA's VANTAGE Marine Version 11.6, the first result of the acquisition of Tribon Solutions, the world leader in ship hull design and production.
In the coming weeks we look forward to bringing you a look at what vendors and industry experts consider “emerging technologies” for the year 2006.
AECWeekly is a news magazine featuring important industry news profiles, a summary of recently published AEC product and company news, customer wins, and coming events. Brought to you by AECCafe.
AECWeekly examines select top news each week, picks out worthwhile reading from around the web, and special interest items you might not find elsewhere. This issue will feature Industry News, Acquisitions/Agreements/Alliances, Announcements, Wins, Appointments, New Products, Around the Web and Upcoming Events.
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Industry News
On the High Seas with AVEVA Ship Design and Production Software
By Susan Smith
AVEVA Americas' Marine industry manager, Rob Glasier, is clearly wild about ships and shipbuilding. “They're fascinating because they are about the biggest thing mankind has ever made and they are very complex.”
Rob Glasier |
At the recent American Shipbuilding Annual Meeting and Congressional Caucus, of which AVEVA is an industry partner, it was stated that while there are problems in shipbuilding in the U.S. competitively around the world, it is still a huge market with a tremendous amount of employment. The challenge is that the U.S. needs to build more ships, particularly naval vessels, as the competition abroad, especially in China, threatens to outdo the U.S. “By 2013 or earlier, China expects to have the world's largest navy by far, probably 2 to 3 times as many ships as we have,” stated Glasier. China does not have the restrictions of government in matters of building that the U.S. has; they simply build 500 ships if they want them. In contrast, the cost of building ships in the U.S. has become so expensive that there is a fear that we won't be able to compete on the high seas in the future.
As Congress is focused on the cost of building naval vessels, another large problem looming on the horizon is that the U.S. doesn't have the efficiencies in the shipyards like the Europeans, Koreans, Japanese and Chinese have.
Basically, AVEVA is ready to address a lot of these global challenges with the marriage of AVEVA and Tribon Solutions. So what do each of these companies bring to the table?
According to Glasier, AVEVA “invented” computer aided process plant design where it was originated in Cambridge in 1967 as the company CADcentre, “in fact they are still associated with Cambridge University,” he noted.
What spawned AVEVA was the idea that any kind of a problem was a database problem, that if it has graphics as part of the solution, whether it is a model created or a drawing created, those are really outputs to help manage the information that's being created. Right from the beginning, AVEVA has had a datacentric approach, centered around the whole idea that you created a database, and output drawings or models out of that database: the genesis of their plant design product PDMS.
Around the same time (about thirty years ago), Kockums Shipyard in Sweden was trying to automate. Their computer systems group developed tools to use for the shipyard. Kockums eventually spun this group off as Kockums Computer Systems which remained separate but co-owned by the shipyard and they sold their solution. Kockums Computer Systems, or KCS, was renamed Tribon Solutions in 2000 when The Sixth Pension Fund bought KCS from Celsius, owner of Kockums Shipyard and other military companies. KCS' approach was a datacentric approach to ship design where a ship model database is created with intelligence added. As you add intelligence to that database, it gets more information and is able to do preliminary design, detail design and structural design, but with a datacentric approach.
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These “topsides” are the same in offshore: the topsides or superstructures of most all vessels and platforms have been plant design challenges executed by AEC/plant design systems.
“But the hull is a very unique problem,” Glasier charged. “because you have three big issues with the hull, which take it out of the realm of a mechanical design system or plant design system. 1) a lot of contours with ships, as well as with offshore platforms, especially when you get into deepwater stuff, such as Spar platforms, Tension Leg Platforms (TLPs), semi-submersibles, etc. and the crossover which is the Floating Production and Offloading System (FPSO), which is basically like a ship designed just to be a drilling production platform. They all have hull design problems which have a lot of unique geometries. Mechanical systems can kind of handle the geometry, plant design systems can't. 2) But ships and platforms have a lot of structural and piping components like in AEC/plant products which have to fit inside the ship 'shipshape shape.' Mechanical systems don't have the structural engineering, the structural design, and piping design capabilities to handle putting all the stuff inside, and plant design systems can't handle the complex geometries. Ships are really unique because they're so complex; they have hundreds of thousands of components.”
3) Ship hulls, whether they're for a platform or a hull, are so huge, and just like a building, whether it's a building or a plant, they have to be broken up into compartments and spaces both from a design and manufacturing and production standpoint. The design must be handled modularly, then put back together at the job site. Again, plant design systems can handle that part of it but mechanical systems can't.”
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VANTAGE Marine, aligns the best-in-class technology for outfitting and topsides from PDMS, and the best-in-class hull and ship production capabilities of Tribon. For the past four years AVEVA has been developing VANTAGE Enterprise Net (VNET), its information integration portal technology.
AVEVA shipped VANTAGE Marine 11.6, a first release, in July. “What VANTAGE Marine creates is a common ship model database which basically is made of Tribon hull information and PDMS outfitting information in a common database,” Glasier explained “We're evolving that with VANTAGE Marine 12.0 due out in early 2007, VANTAGE Marine 12 will be the migration of all the hull capabilities directly in to AVEVA's Dabacon system which is the main database that manages all this information.”
Almost all of AVEVA's major offshore projects in are in deepwater which is officially classified as water over 1500 feet, according to Glasier. “You start running into serious hull design problems at those depths. It's staggering engineering and construction work, so we're letting the shipbuilders know that in addition to hull design and production tools with VANTAGE Marine, AVEVA also has a really nice Lifecycle Information Management (LIM) capability with VNET to manage this information. LIM isn't that big in the commercial shipbuilding world but it is big in the naval world. We still have ships that are on active duty on the fleet that are replenishment ships from the World War II era.”
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Another area of enlightenment for offshore engineers is the notion of the lifecycle information management system. “If you have all the information about your platform in a lifecycle information management system you could immediately access all the design, maintenance and operating procedures information about your platform. Wouldn't it be great to have that information, right now when you're trying to find out what's damaged? What do you need to do to get this platform back online?” Glasier posed the questions that many have been asking over the past couple of months in response to the daunting task of rebuilding after Katrina and Rita, or “Katrita” as many Offshore people call it.
Historically, Glasier said, once a platform is in production, they don't keep an on-line database of up-to-date design and engineering information about it. Now they're beginning to see that if they had moved the platform from as-designed, to as-built, to a lifecycle management system, they would have information more readily available to handle the damage that's occurred as a result of these hurricanes. “We think that this is going to move people toward lifecycle management instead of just design to construction thinking.”
In commercial ship design, he said, LIM is a tougher sell than Naval. “Owners want to run the ships flat out. They aren't so interested in information management. At least to date. We hope to change that thinking.”
A key tool used for as-built design is laser scanning. “The only time your design and as-built are the same is before you start building. You start making changes almost immediately.” AVEVA has the Laser Model Interface (LMI) module that integrates with Bitwyse, Leica-Geosystems, Quantapoint, Zoller + Froelich (Z+F), and Trimble, that allows your solution to the bring point clouds directly into your model. This will allow the creation of accurate as-built project models to use in LIM, bringing significant downstream value to the model now created in design, and used primarily only for construction.
Glasier concluded, “We are very excited about our future in shipbuilding and offshore, and related marine industries with VANTAGE Marine, VNET, and all the other products in the AVEVA suite. With the high cost of oil and gas, and the increasing internationalization of trade, which is using the world's waterways as its transportation infrastructure, we will be providing the most productive and cost effective solutions to the world's top firms.”
Acquisitions/Agreements/Alliances
BuilderMT, workflow management software provider for residential homebuilders, announced it has formed a joint marketing agreement with Verizon Communications Inc., a Dow 30 company. Verizon partnered with BuilderMT in part because over 550 home building companies responsible for over 180,000 starts use BuilderMT to manage their every day workflow.
netGuru Inc.'s board of directors, on the recommendation of a special committee of the board, approved a cash distribution in the amount of $0.85 per share payable on January 27, 2006, to shareholders of record as of January 17, 2006.
The distribution follows the Company's sale of the assets of its Research Engineers International subsidiary and STAAD product lines in November and the board of directors' subsequent decision to distribute substantially all of the net proceeds of the sale after repaying debt and setting aside reserves for taxes, continuing operations, and other contingencies.
Announcements
The U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) has unveiled a series of major process improvements to its LEED (Leadership in Energy & Environmental Design) green building rating system, including a significantly streamlined documentation and certification process that's now 100% online. A direct result of market surveys and extensive dialogue with the organizations and individuals who use LEED, USGBC anticipates the changes to the LEED process will reduce the time and cost of LEED certification.
Meridian Systems, provider of enterprise project management software for optimizing capital projects, programs and facilities, announced speaking engagements for Meridian president and cofounder John Bodrozic, and Meridian product management director, Tim Kent at the combined 2006 World of Concrete and Technology for Construction conferences.
Meridian was named as the leading software vendor in the categories of project management software and collaboration software for the construction industry in the 2006 National Construction-Technology Survey from Constructech magazine.
Meridian's entries include: Prolog version 7.5 and Proliance version 3.0. To view Meridian's entries by category, click on Technology for Construction.
Autodesk, Inc. announced that its Autodesk Buzzsaw collaborative project management solution played an integral role in the first major construction package that was issued in December on the Freedom Tower project. Skidmore, Owings & Merrill LLP (SOM), the architects for the Freedom Tower, are using Buzzsaw to connect the design teams, consultants, engineers, contractors and project managers from multiple firms of varying disciplines throughout the project lifecycle. During this first major construction phase, the project team relies on Buzzsaw to manage and share 3D models, design and construction drawings, streamlining the flow of all project information.
Wins
Deltek, enterprise software provider for project-based businesses, announced that professional, technical and IT services provider American Systems Corporation (AMERICAN SYSTEMS) has purchased Deltek GovWin, a business development and capture solution for government contractors.
Appointments
AVEVA Inc., the business unit of AVEVA Group plc covering the American continents, has hired two new sales positions. Mr. Otto Weiberth has been appointed Head of Sales for AVEVA's U.S. and Latin America operations, and Mr. Emon Zaman has been appointed Regional Manager of AVEVA Canada, a wholly-owned subsidiary based in Calgary, Alberta.
New Products
Nemetschek North America released a free, downloadable VectorWorks Viewer application that has been updated for VectorWorks 12, as a benefit to its customers. The Viewer enables those who do not own the program to view and print projects created in VectorWorks Fundamentals, VectorWorks Architect, VectorWorks Landmark, VectorWorks Spotlight, VectorWorks Machine Design, and VectorWorks Designer.
CoCreate Software, Inc., a provider of 3rd Generation PLM software applications, announced a special upgrade offer for CoCreate Designer Drafting customers. Upgrade to OneSpace Designer Modeling for free.
The new product, CADLock, which you can try before you buy, adds a new locked drawing file type, DWX, to AutoCAD's standard SaveAs and Open commands. CADLock automatically prompts for the information it needs, such as passkeys and drawing restrictions. CADLock saves unmodifiable owner information inside the drawing file. Wherever the drawing file goes, it always displays the originating company's name, a contact name, and phone number or email address. The freely available CADLock runtime ( CADLock RT) is also a functional demo of CADLock.
Around the Web
Microsoft Ships Emergency Patch by Ryan Naraine, EWeek, January 5, 2006 - the Strong customer demand pushed Microsoft to release an emergency update fix for the Windows Metafile vulnerability on Thursday, January 5 rather than waiting to January 10.
Google's Next Move: Consumer hardware? by Ben Charny, EWeek, January 3, 2006-- After so many years of dealing almost exclusively in Internet-based services like search, sources say Google Inc. appears to be entering a new phase focused more on consumer electronics.
Upcoming Events
| AIAS FORUM 2005: Cincinnati | |
| Date: | December 29, 2005 - January 2, 2006 |
| Place: | Hilton Cincinnati Netherland Plaza
Cincinnati, OH USA |
| For ages, social, economic and natural disasters have provided the human race with unique problems and opportunities. Whether the sacking of Rome, the burning of London, the Great Depression, the race riots of Los Angeles or the most recent tragedies from terrorism and natural disasters, humans have always responded to each crisis with an unparalleled level of passion and creativity. In our cities, we can see that the healing process that follows disaster often brings great change to both societal paradigm and the built environment.
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| The International Builders’ Show | |
| Date: | January 1 - 14, 2006 |
| Place: | Orlando, FL USA |
| Think of it as your convenient corner marketplace. It’s where you’ll find more builders and more suppliers than anywhere else in the world. Make sure you’re there to discover the products and services you need to keep your business going strong.
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| Technology for Construction | |
| Date: | January 17 - 20, 2006 |
| Place: | Las Vegas Convention Center, Las Vegas, NV USA |
| Join architects, engineers and construction professionals from throughout the country and around the world for a four-day, market-wide exchange of ideas and strategies.
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| daratechPLANT 2006 | |
| Date: | January 22 - 25, 2006 |
| Place: | Houston, TX USA |
| Schedule compression, cost reduction, safety, business-, and engineering-process enhancements, six-sigma quality, and practices that bring these about through the strategic deployment of technologies that solve real problems and enhance collaboration are at the heart of daratechPLANT conferences.
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| 5th Annual New Partners for Smart Growth | |
| Date: | January 26 - 28, 2006 |
| Place: | Adam's Mark Hotel
Denver, CO USA |
| The New Partners for Smart Growth Conference has grown significantly since it began several years ago--increasing in scope, attendance, and prestige--and is now considered to be the "premier" smart growth conference held each year. The strength of this conference comes from the variety of participants and speakers who cross disciplines to share experiences and insights, and valuable tools and strategies to encourage smart growth implementation and "get it done."
The 2006 conference continues this exciting trend and includes more new partners than ever. They recognize smart growth as a viable solution to the many challenges posed by growth; they may see it as a smart investment, an opportunity to spur economic development, and/or a way to improve the public health. With the challenges our nation is currently facing--at home and abroad--there are more reasons than ever to join hands with new partners and work toward our common goal of creating safe, healthy, and livable communities for all. |
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