The document discusses how the University of Washington uses FME to manage over 1700 AutoCAD floorplan drawings by stitching them together into a seamless Esri Geodatabase. It describes the challenges of processing a large number of drawings incrementally to avoid missing any floors or rooms. The process uses FME as a subprocess within Python scripts to extract data from new or updated drawings and insert it into geodatabase versions. This allows the floorplan data to be updated automatically on an hourly basis from the AutoCAD Vault.

1. Managing Floorplans with
AutoCAD and ArcGIS Using
FME
Steve Grisé – Vertex3
April 10, 2013

2. University of Washington (Seattle)
 20+ million square feet of floor space
 Growth: 1400 to 1700 floors in the past 3 years
 Capital Projects Office contracts and manages
construction
 After construction facilities are handed over to
Facilities Management
 Use FME to stitch together 1700+ dwg files into a
seamless Esri Geodatabase

3. The Campus

4. The Campus

5. Inside the Skin of the Buildings

6. Demo
 Load a few drawings
 1125 02,B1,03

7. Data Flow
Floorplan Autodesk ETL Geodatabase
Drawings Vault/Mirror

8. Challenges
 Large number of drawings
 Original Arcpy script never completed
 Ran for as long as a day before …
 Need to make sure that incremental update
process will never result in “missing”
floors/rooms
 Processing somewhat simplified through ArcGIS
for AutoCAD

9. Logic
 Windows process scans the vault
mirror every hour and looks for
new drawings
 Xml config file(s) drives most of
the process
 GDB versions used for transactional
update
 Main function is python without
arcpy
 Arcpysubprocesses
 FME subprocesses
 Full run completes in ~28 hours

10. Processing Logic
 For each drawing
 Create a version
 Make a feature view
 Delete existing records for layers/floor
 Call FME as a subprocess to insert new data
 If everything worked:
 Rec and post version
 Else:
 Delete version

11. Later Additions
 Easier Xml config
 Add layers and processes
 Parallel processing
 Simplified script logic
 Needed a lobotomy…
 Graphical challenges
 Self-intersections
 Catwalks
 Arch multi-part lines for faster display
 Floor polygons

12. Trends
 Simple approach for smaller campuses/new users
 MSC feature classes/attributes
 Geoprocessing/FME options
 More sophisticated tools for advanced users and
non-MSC data/attributes
 FME +
 Cloud
 Tribal campus networks and associated
performance

13. Thank You!
 Questions?
 For more information:
 Steve Grisé
 steve@vertex3.com
 226-444-0323