New Autodesk Infrastructure Tools

This is a reprint from an earlier blog (August 9, 2011) that is no longer available online.

There’s some new tools in the Autodesk Infrastructure world. Autodesk has just released a few new products for the geospatial world. The Autodesk Infrastructure Modeler is the production release of the former AutoCAD Labs Project Galileo. It is conceptual modeling application that let’s you mix and match GIS, BIM, CAD and image data to quickly get a view of potential design options. You can create very realistic views of an entire area, both above and below the surface. One of the cool things is the ability to include and show underground utilities generated from your GIS data.

Another new tool is not really new at all, but a redesign of an existing powerful system. AutoCAD Utility Design has been released, and it’s the new implementation of the former Autodesk Utility Design. The name change to AutoCAD represents the movement towards a powerful standards-driven tool built within the powerful design and documentation environment of AutoCAD.
AutoCAD Utility Design is built on the AutoCAD and AutoCAD Map 3D technologies. It combines template and workflow-based design tools with GIS to create in intelligent 3D connected network model for the electric utility industry. Autodesk added easy-to-use templates and workflow tools built on a powerful rules base to create consistent designs based on engineering standards. AutoCAD Utility Design includes engineering reports and documentation as a by-product of the design, rather than having to go back through the design to pull data and manually compile common reports. It includes engineering tools for calculating voltage drop, cable tensioning, sag, pole sizing, guying and others. The model is also designed to allow integration with existing supply, EAM, and other enterprise systems.
In a former life at an electric utility, I helped implement Autodesk Utility Design and did some planning for integration with the GIS and Asset Management Systems. I also had the chance to do some trials with Project Galileo while it was in the Autodesk Labs. I’m pretty excited for these new releases and am looking forward to working with these.