Jerry Laiserin
The following is an exclusive “sneak peek” at as-yet-unreleased technology provided to the author exclusively by Graphisoft. It is copyright 2009 by Jerry Laiserin,
What’s the problem?
As model data integration goes up, flexibility of workflow and performance in collaboration go down. If multiple project team members work concurrently on a central project model, conflicts among their respective changes will arise unless access to the model is controlled. Each user must, therefore, reserve or check out or be assigned a workspace or work set (or functionally equivalent subset of the total model) containing portions of the building allocated for work by that user—and thereby restricted or locked out of access for changes by other users. Changes made by each user to his or her local copy of the central project model must be synchronized with or updated to the central project model by merging each user’s local copy of the entire project back to the central project model.
What are the solutions?
Providers of BIM model-authoring tools have tried diverse approaches to resolving these issues. One approach is to sidestep the “reservation”
How is TW2 different?
Following the historical example of the young hero Alexander the Great who cut through the Gordian Knot that the greatest minds of his era had been unable to untangle, Graphisoft has cut through BIM workflow and collaboration barriers and bottlenecks by fundamentally re-thinking what’s central, what’s local and how they connect to each other.
The result is that Graphisoft’s TW2 technology can perform in as little as 1–2 seconds many update operations (e.g., from a user’s local copy to the central project file) that might take 10–20 minutes with other tools. In fact, updating a user’s local copy of the model file to the central project in TW2 often can be faster than regenerating a copy of the model on that user’s own PC (in other words, LAN/WAN model update performance that imposes little or no time lag penalty compared to working locally—the threshold of inattention never is reached). Furthermore, TW2 offers such flexibility and granularity in allocating model elements to work on—and making those allocations readily and instantly visible to all—that existing schemes for reserving and releasing individual elements (or entire worksets or workspaces) suddenly seem clumsy and counter-productive (to say nothing of the amount of off-screen communication required by most existing methods). Plus, TW2’s order-of-magnitude leaps in collaborative performance and workflow flexibility are accompanied by significant advances in security, reliability and robustness of the entire model-authoring system.
For any firm or project team struggling with the frustrations of existing solutions to these problems (even with ArchiCAD itself and its existing, original Teamwork approach) TW2 surely will be seen as disruptive technology that will displace “legacy BIM” approaches just as the legacy BIM tools in their time displaced the legacy CAD methods that preceded them. However, to fully understand the profound and potentially industry-transforming impact of what Graphisoft has achieved with TW2, it may be helpful to zoom out to a broader overview of BIM-method collaboration in both historical and current contexts.
Who is it for?
For readers who haven’t guessed by now, I believe Graphisoft’s TW2 technology will prove beneficial to any individuals, project teams or firms engaged in BIM and/or IDP methods. The benefits can be divided into general benefits versus those applicable to firms of specific sizes—small, medium and large.
TW2’s general benefits start with access to elements. Reserving elements to work on in each user’s local copy of the project model under TW2 is easy and can be done completely on the fly. Editing is essentially unchanged from current methods in ArchiCAD, but saving and receiving changes under TW2 is radically accelerated because the new, element-level granularity limits data flow between server and client in both directions to just the incremental changes—without any further model clean-up and/or management actions required. Releasing elements is as quick, easy and flexible as reserving them.
For small-to-mid-
atOne Software, a subsidiary of Khalid Almoayed &Sons WLL is the official reseller for Graphisoft products in GCC countries, Syria, Jordan and Lebanon.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Jerry Laiserin helps AECO businesses build smarter through the integration of technology strategy and business process. His consulting clientele includes “Top 500” design and construction organizations, public and private owner/operators, as well as many leading vendors of software and services for this market.
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