Client:
Consolidated Contractors Company (CCC) is the largest construction company in the Middle East and ranks among the top twenty international contractors with revenue of more than $5.2 billion in 2011, offices and projects in more than 40 countries, and a workforce of more than 150,000 employees.
Problem Statement:
CCC uses a proprietary PLM system to control different processes throughout the company. The PLM system provides advanced capabilities for working with design data stored in the proprietary C3DX file format, while Autodesk Revit is used on a large number of projects. For this reason, interoperability between Autodesk Revit and the PLM system became a priority issue.
Project Setup:
AMC Bridge is an expert in handling 3D modeling data and also has an extensive background in developing applications based on Autodesk Revit APIs. This expertise allowed the members of the AMC Bridge technical team to quickly assess the scope of the project, based on the requirements provided by CCC, and propose the most effective solution based on the development of an add-in application to Autodesk Revit that enables the export of Revit models to C3DX format.
Project Implementation:
Advanced functionality had to be developed in order to ensure conformation with the specifics of the data handled by the application, such as:
– Feature recognition – not all geometry primitives in Autodesk Revit had an exact match in C3DX format, so some of the modeling constructs had to be identified by analyzing the geometry of the faces in the models;
– Optimization of the processing of large amounts of data – large models in Autodesk Revit may contain millions of individual elements, so special optimizations had to be established in order to control the amount of memory used by the application and minimize conversion time.
During the second half of the project development cycle, AMC Bridge provided CCC with regular application updates. This allowed the CCC QA Engineers and Product Definition specialists to experience functionality as it was being developed, in order to ensure correct implementation and also enable adjustment of the original requirements, based on early interaction with the product.
