Bentley Announces AECOsim Family

Helps Deliver High Performance, Intelligent Buildings; AECOsim Compliance Manager Is Immediately Available, and AECOsim Building Designer and AECOsim Energy Simulator Are Continuing Early Adopter Programs

Bentley Systems, Incorporated, the leading company dedicated to providing comprehensive software solutions for sustaining infrastructure, today introduced at this annual gathering of infrastructure professionals its new AECOsim family of information modeling applications. Software tools from other vendors, despite their individual merits, impede best practices for integrated projects and require users to manage, learn, and transfer data across a disparate combination of independently purposed tools. The premise of AECOsim is that integrated projects benefit from interdisciplinary integration – and that rigor in analysis and simulation, as opposed to merely notional analysis, need not be sacrificed in an information modeling workflow based on full information reuse.

Bentley’s AECOsim family uniquely provides interdisciplinary building design, analysis, and simulation software focused on helping architectural, engineering, and construction professionals deliver high performance, intelligent buildings. AECOsim enables best practices in integrated building systems design and performance simulation, and results in simulations that properly represent design intention and accurately predict the performance of the delivered building. These applications enable architects and engineers to author and use rich information models to:

• predictively design and interactively optimize the performance of building systems, while benefiting from integrated workflows among multiple disciplines – all facilitated by the software’s decision-support capabilities,
• produce high-quality building and project documentation, including by way of Bentley’s new hypermodel innovation, for use throughout the project lifecycle of design, construction, and operations.

They also extend the capabilities of commonly available design tools from Bentley, Autodesk (including AutoCAD and Revit), Graphisoft Archicad, and others through their support of open standards.

Bentley’s AECOsim Compliance Manager software as a service (SaaS) is launching today and immediately available. AECOsim Building Designer and AECOsim Energy Simulator are currently in the course of Bentley’s early adopter programs, through which software becomes field-proven and refined with the assistance of Bentley users. During the remainder of this year they will be available to Bentley SELECT subscribers for their use and review as product previews, followed by general availability.

AECOsim Building Designer

AECOsim Building Designer provides information-rich multidisciplinary models for use as the centerpiece of a building design workflow, as well as for the integration of design simulation, analysis, and documentation. This innovative Building Information Modeling (BIM) application empowers architects and structural, mechanical, and electrical engineers to:

• create the most complex of buildings and constructions with unparalleled design freedom using comprehensive engineering tools in an immersive design environment,
• simulate designs with direct links to analysis applications for interdisciplinary optimization,
• produce photorealistic images and animations,
• generate fully coordinated construction documentation for output as paper or dynamic PDF deliverables,
• interact with drawings in their appropriate 3D context – hypermodels – navigating callout links to enhance and clarify the 3D model, which serves as a spatial index,
• deliver hypermodels, for immersive review, to constructors and owners conveying the design team’s full and best work, and offering integrated-project benefits regardless of the project delivery method.

This single, integrated application includes tools for architectural, structural, mechanical systems, and electrical design as well as construction documentation. At the same time, its users can take full advantage of the many benefits associated with BIM. Among these are an informed work environment that leads to better decisions and better-performing infrastructure, along with lower-cost and faster project execution. In addition, its task-oriented, consistent user interface and compatible data formats improve interdisciplinary coordination, work integration, and tool sharing – enhancing project quality and reducing project risks.

Santanu Das, Bentley vice president, Integrated Engineering Group, said, “AECOsim Building Designer provides users with the ability to work in a multidisciplinary model integrating design, simulation, analysis, and documentation. Distributed project teams will be able to work on large, complex, and comprehensive information models, resulting in the ability to deliver bigger and more finely detailed projects. With the new built-in clash detection capability, users can quickly identify and resolve interference issues directly in the design environment and earlier in the project timeline. AECOsim Building Designer’s unique capabilities should help users reduce project cost, time, and risk, and enhance overall project quality. At the same time, owner-operators benefit from higher returns on their investments.”

AECOsim Energy Simulator

AECOsim Energy Simulator is a rigorous yet intuitive application for the design, simulation, and analysis of building mechanical systems, environmental conditions, and energy performance. Used in both design and retrofit work, the software contributes to better-performing, more-sustainable buildings that consume less energy; provide greater occupant productivity, comfort, and safety; and control lifecycle operational energy costs for their owners.

AECOsim Energy Simulator incorporates the EnergyPlus simulation engine, the emerging standard for the industry developed by the U.S. Department of Energy. AECOsim Energy Simulator allows designers to quickly assess design trade-offs in both new construction and retrofits. It is ideally suited to the needs of engineers, building energy consultants, and designers who determine building energy loads and explore building HVAC systems and design configuration options by simulating and analyzing building energy performance in workflows utilizing commonly available design tools from Bentley, Autodesk (including AutoCAD and Revit), Graphisoft Archicad, and others.

The software features comprehensive mechanical and energy performance design capabilities that facilitate compliance with industry standards using automated ASHRAE 90.1 comparisons. This further reduces project risk and results in time savings by expediting the certification process.

Dru Crawley, Bentley director, Building Energy Performance Products, said, “AECOsim Energy Simulator is a unique application for the immersive design, simulation, and analysis of building mechanical systems, environmental conditions, and energy performance. It incorporates the emerging industry standard EnergyPlus simulation engine from the U.S. Department of Energy, allows access to all HVAC inputs and outputs, and matches the actual building conditions to the building simulation. This capability will greatly improve project quality with accurate simulations that closely match the actual building performance. In addition, users will be able to reduce risk and cost with the automatic creation of all four required ASHRAE 90.1 baseline models.”

AECOsim Compliance Manager

AECOsim Compliance Manager is a new project management and collaboration SaaS that automates the United States Green Building Council’s (USGBC) LEED certification process. It empowers project teams to achieve LEED certification more accurately, more quickly, and at a lower cost.

Its centralized online LEED data repository and full system of record for all project team activity, document storage, and electronic submissions provide sophisticated reporting capabilities, historical analysis, and access to past projects for best practices information. In addition, AECOsim Compliance Manager’s step-by-step task and LEED credit management, checklists, wizards and calculators, automated LEED credits, teamwork tools, and more all help projects achieve maximum LEED ranking.

“LEED certification is a highly complex and technically rigorous process,” said Huw Roberts, Bentley global marketing director, “and tackling it with generic software modified for LEED certification makes the challenge all the more difficult. Project teams find themselves struggling to manage an overwhelming amount of data, and often must deal with data inconsistencies that slow progress and waste dollars.”

He continued, “In comparison, our new AECOsim Compliance Manager has been developed for the specific purpose of streamlining LEED certification. It extends these capabilities to users of design tools from Bentley as well as others, such as AutoCAD, Revit, and Archicad. It enables experienced and new LEED certification teams alike to readily manage the mountain of data LEED certification requires through the use of automated workflows that lead to maximized LEED rankings.”

Designed by expert LEED consultants specifically for LEED project teams, AECOsim Compliance Manager is the first service of its kind to be fully integrated with USGBC’s LEED Online. It provides communication, collaboration, and task accountability across the entire certification project team, and results in increased productivity and higher-quality work.

Users can access AECOsim Compliance Manager from the office, construction site, or just about any location using a mobile device, such as an iPhone or iPad, and an Internet connection. Since it’s SaaS, the software updates automatically, eliminating costly programming and IT installations, and ensuring project quality. Moreover, its cloud-hosting environment provides project teams with backup and redundancy to reduce risk.

At the heart of AECOsim Compliance Manager is a relational database that maintains data consistency and creates opportunities for analysis. This enables users to better control quality and reduces time spent manually reviewing LEED documents created by other team members.

The software’s integration with Google Maps to consider project location enables automatic distance calculations that can be used to more efficiently meet the requirements of several LEED credits. It also provides distance calculations for local materials sourcing to save time and minimize errors.

For additional information about AECOsim Building Designer, AECOsim Energy Simulator, and AECOsim Compliance Manager, visit www.bentley.com/AECOsim.