OpenSite Designer for Airports?

Airports are a toxic subject in the UK at the moment, given the carbon targets and covid travel restrictions... and associated lay-offs. So, I was surprised to see this recent planning approval.

Leeds Bradford is not a major airport, and the planning application is not the largest or most complex but it is worth looking at the deliverables. Filter for Background Papers and Drawings.

As you would expect, the bulk of the work is still rather CAD-based rather BIM or R*vit-based, being civils rather than architect-led.

Some observations:

1. Huge area given over to car park provision. Airports are notorious for generating huge parking areas. Not sure why a multi-storey carpark structure wasn't proposed here, given the amount of paving and drainage and landscaping work I would have thought it comparable cost-wise. In any case...

OpenSite Designer would be a core tool here given its:-

  • Cut / fill optimisation solver
  • In-built carparking design tools
  • Roadway layout tools including integration with OpenRoads
  • Drainage tools SUE/SUDA

Further integration with:-

  • OpenFlows / WaterGEMS
  • OpenUtilities for site electrical and comms routing
  • gINT?
  • Signage via SignCAD?
  • Roadway marking via Transoft?
  • External lighting via OpenBuildings Designer?
  • Landscaping- it would be good to have some more landscaping tools in OpenSite Designer?

2. Apron and runway slabs: I expect that the layouts would be designed using tools like Transoft's Aviplan, AirTop, SkySafe etc But would OpenSite or Openroads be used to design the pavement? In combo with STAAD or RCDC?

Moving further away from OpenSite, large civils projects invariably come with lots of environmental assessment requirements. A lot of work and costs associated with this.

3. LVIA: I wonder if the new OrbitGT / Context Capture / OpenCites Map tools wouldn't be the natural platform for this kind of thing. The old skool Verified View Montages are not very updateable.

4. Acoustic contours: Already a number of examples of web-based hosting and modeling available. iTwins would be a great platform for this.

5. Air quality: ditto

6. Traffic: CUBE models on iTwins. Updatable to cover construction phases and handed over to client to update during operations, Day Two works.

  • Hi dominic,

    I absolutely agree with you although my focus is on Airports in the US, airfield design.

    Actually I found your post when I started searching for uses of OpenRoads Designer and Opensite for airport work. Opensite Designer and OpenRoads Designer already have the underlying technology needed to accomplish some airfield design tasks. However, adapting them for for Civil Design work on Airports would add lots of value! Here is what I was hoping to find use cases for:

    1. Site Layout Tools: In addition to laying out vehicle parking stalls can they also be adopted for laying out aircraft tie-downs and grounding points with correct spacing and clearances?

    2. Pathway/Driveway Tools: Lay out Taxiways with taxiway fillets and returns that meet FAA, ICAO, and DoD criteria.

    3. Parceling Tools: Lay out lease lots, land acquisitions, etc. based upon needed airfield clearances such as Safety Areas, Object Free Areas, Runway Protection Zones, etc. Maybe use these to determine where buildings and aircraft tie-downs can be placed relative to taxiways, taxilanes, and runways.

    4. Pad/Building Tool: Lay out the terminal buildings, hangars, building pads, equipment pads, etc. as needed.

    5. Geometry and Corridor modeling tools can take care of the rest including laying out Airfield lights where points can be placed as cells and designing runways and aprons.

    6. Based on how the technology works it would be interesting to add an airspace analysis tool that does some kind of clash detection to determine whether trees and other objects are penetrating the navigable airspace and also tabulate, label, and track them for Airport Layout Plans and Master Planning efforts.

    7. An Airfield Markings tool would be great.

    We are already using the tools in the software for this stuff, but it would be great to have tools geared toward airfield designers. Especially if the airfield "design criteria" can be set then work with the default values.

  • Hoh! Just been talking to someone about kickstarting new apps and features yesterday.

    Yes, it would be great if Bentley would step in and roadmap these features. They don't seem to be very complicated. But the task would be subject to all kinds of debate internally and I suspect will quickly bog down and disappear. How would the lucky project manager or sponsor go about putting together a business case? There will be lots of competition for a limited amount of internal 'venture capital'. And what happens if the initiative flops? Probably not a viable risk/reward mechanism in place, so most staff will shy away from going out on a limb to plead too enthusiastically on your behalf.

    The best case scenario would be when a large organisation -or user group- puts down some 'startup' money and says 'we will pay a bit extra for this'. This obviously will be rare.... but it does happen?

    Even rarer, is when Bentley goes in 50:50 and invests in the venture with customer. Bentley has been doing this with some big Chinese engineers for strategic reasons. The problem is that this would mean that the engineering partner would also need a fairly competent inhouse coding department. Also rare these days.

    I suppose some governmental users are large enough to have an external IBM-style IT integrator or channel partner that could provide the coding support. Probably even rarer.

    For smaller users, channel partners also seem to be a dying breed as all the major vendors are progressively going subscription and selling direct, removing the margins for the channel partners that would support this kind of thing.

    What about hiring an Independent Software Developer (ISD)? Well, also thin on the ground. Bentley market share does not have critical mass for a competitive, normally functioning externaI ecosystem so the costs will be high (dgn-based dev is a niche/side market and will struggle due to the smaller available/aging talent pool) ... and there will be questions about quality and access to the core native APIs where most of the functionality is, the managed 'wrapper' APIs being more limited. Although this is changing, I suspect this will be a very slow process as externalising APIs is also expensive. Easier for Bentley devs just to peek at each other's source code, internal GitHub when they need to... smile or scream a bit and move on. Stuck out tongue winking eye

    If you are lucky, you have some in-house coding talent. But they will be an overhead cost that will be difficult to pass on. Also subject to the same problems the ISDs have. Actually, even worse quality problems as a lot of the work is done by domain practitioners -and not pro coders- using 'RAD' tools that are not intended for scalability / maintenance.

    Could you interest a third party to take on the task? Maybe even the likes of Transoft, which I think already have a lot of the features mentioned, on the ACAD platform? This would be ideal from a Bentley perspective: No risk. Due to the IPO, there will be a lot of pressure to focus on 'bread and butter' functionality that contributes to ARR, so things like getting Dynamic Views to work properly for documentation to allow transitioning to CE will take priority. Yes, problems even after almost ten years in the wild. But how would you search for interested 3rd party devs? Stackoverflow? University Comp Science chat rooms? Darknet? :-)

    Even then, a lot of OpenRoads tools are based on constraints-solving combined with rules. Not sure this will actually be accessible to third parties. Any new features will probably be standalone and not have a lot of the more advanced behaviour you get with the core tools.

    If this is acceptable, maybe the starting point should be some basic automation tools based on something like GC, which I understand is available with OpenRoads via Mstn? Apparently, GC is a good place to leverage dotNet assemblies as well. It would be interesting to see if this will eventually result in ORoads/Site-specific nodes like OpenBuildings Designer.

  • Perhaps a good starting point there is in the growing Airport Digital Twin Market and then start working backward to develop design tools that support the planning and design process ... similar to OpenRoads Designer and Conceptstation but for airports.