Autodesk Tandem, the cloud-based digital twin platform, is evolving at an impressive pace. Unusually, much of its development is happening out in the open, with regular monthly or quarterly feature preview updates and open Q&A sessions. Martyn Day takes a closer look at what’s new
Project Tandem, as it used be known, was initiated in February 2020, previewed at Autodesk University 2020, and released for public beta in 2021. Four years on, there are still significant layers of technology being added to the product, now focussing on higher levels of functionality beyond dashboards and connecting to IoT sensors, adding systems knowledge, support for timeline events and upgrades to fundamentals such as visualisation quality.
Tandem development seems to have followed a unique path, maintaining its incubator-like status, with Autodesk placing a significant bet on the future size of an embryonic market.
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For those following the development of Tandem the one thing that comes across crystal clear, is that creating a digital twin of even a single building — model generation, tagging and sorting assets, assigning subsystems, connecting to IoT, and building dashboards — is a huge task that requires ongoing maintenance of that data.
It’s not really ‘just an output of BIM’ which many might feel is a natural follow on. It has the capability to go way beyond the scope of what is normally called Facilities Management (FM), which has mainly been carried out with 2D drawings.
The quantitative benefit of building a digital twin requires dedication, investment and an adoption of twins as a core business strategy. For large facilities, like airports, universities, hospitals – anything with significant operating expenses – this should be a ‘no brainer’ but as with any investment the owner/operator has to pay upfront to build the twin, to realise the benefits in the long tail, measured in years and decades. This, to me, makes the digital twins market not a volume product play.
Tandem evolution
My first observation is that the visual quality of Tandem has really gone up a notch, or three. Tandem is partially developed using Autodesk’s Forge components (now called Autodesk Platform Services). The model viewer front end came from the Forge viewer, which to be honest was blocky and a bit crappy-looking, in a 1990s computer graphics kind of way. The updated display brings up the rendering quality and everything looks sharper. The models look great and the colour feedback when displaying in-model data is fantastic. It’s amazing that this makes such a difference, but it brings the graphics in to the 21st century. Tandem looks good.
As Tandem has added more layers of functionality the interface tool palettes have grown. The interface is still being refined, and Autodesk is now adopting the approach of offering different UIs to cater to different user personas, such as operators who might be more familiar with 2D floor plans than 3D.
Other features that have been added include the ability to use labels or floor plans to isolate them in the display, auto views to simplify navigation, asset property cards (which can appear in view, as opposed to bringing up the large party panel) and thresholds, which can be set to fire off alerts when unexpected behaviour is identified. Users can now create groups of assets and allocate them to concepts such as ‘by room’. Spaces can now also be drawn directly in Tandem.
Speed is also improved. As Tandem is database centric, not file based, it enables dynamic loading of geometry and data, leading to fast performance even with complex models. It also facilitates the ability to retain all historical data and easily integrate new data sources as the product grows. This is the way all design-related software will run. Tandem benefits from being conceived in this modern cloud era.
That said, development of Tandem has moved beyond simply collecting, filtering, tagging and visualising data to providing actionable insights and recommendations. From talking with Bob Bray, vice president and general manager of Autodesk Tandem and Tim Kelly, head of Tandem product strategy, the next big step for Tandem is to analyse the rich data collected to identify issues and suggest optimisations. These proactive insights would include potential cost savings and carbon footprint reduction through intelligent HVAC management based on actual occupancy data.
Systems tracing
Having dumb geometry in dumb spaces was pretty much the full extent of traditional CAFM. Digital twins can and should be way smarter. The systems tracing capability in Tandem simplifies the understanding of all the complex building systems and their spatial relationships, aiding operations, maintenance, and troubleshooting. By clicking on building system elements, you can see the connections between different elements within a building’s systems and see how networks of branches and zones relate to the physical spaces they serve and identify where critical components are located within the space. This means if something goes wrong, should that be discovered via IoT or reported by an occupant, systems tracing allows the issue to be pinpointed down to a specific level and room. Users can select a component like an air supply and then trace its connection down though subsystems to the spaces it serves.
Tandem is a cloud-based conduit, pooling information from multiple sources which is then refined by each user to give them insight into layers of spatial and telemetric data
Building in this connection between components to make a ‘system’, used to be a pretty manual process. Now, Tandem can automatically map the relationships between spaces and systems and use them for analysis to identify the root cause of problems. Timelines Data is valuable and BMS (Building Management Systems) and IoT sensors generate the building equivalent of an ‘ECG’ every couple of seconds. The historical, as well as the live data is incredibly valuable. Timelines in Tandem display this historic sensor data in a visual context. Kelly demonstrated an animated heatmap overlaid on the building model showing how temperature values fluctuate across a facility. It’s now possible to navigate back and forth through a defined period, either stepping through specific points or via animation, seeing changes to assets and spaces.
While the current implementation focuses on visualising historic data, Kelly mentioned the future possibility of the timeline being used to load or hide geometry based on changes over time, reflecting renovations or other physical alterations to the building.
Bray added that Tandem never deletes anything, implying that the historical data required for the timeline functionality is automatically retained within the system. This allows users to access and analyse past performance and conditions within the building at any point in the future, should that become a need.
Asset monitoring
Asset monitoring dashboards in Tandem are designed to provide users with a centralised view for monitoring the performance and status of their key assets. This feature, which is now in beta, aims to help operators identify issues and prioritise their actions. They will be customisable, and users can create dashboards to monitor the specific assets they care about This allows for a tailored overview of the most critical equipment and systems within their facility.
The dashboards will likely allow users to establish KPIs and tolerance thresholds for their assets. By setting these parameters, the system can accurately measure asset performance and identify when an asset is operating outside of expected or acceptable ranges with visual feedback of assets out of optimal performance.
Assets that are consistently operating out of tolerance or experiencing recurring issues can be grouped to aid focus e.g. by level, room, manufacturer. With this in mind, Tandem also has a ‘trend analysis’ capability, allowing users to identify potential future problems based on current performance patterns. The goal of these asset monitoring dashboards is to help drive preventative maintenance and planning for equipment replacement.
Tandem Connect
Digital Twin creation and connectivity to live information means there is a big integration story to tell and it’s different on nearly every implementation. Tandem is a cloud-based conduit, pooling information from multiple sources which is then refined by each user to give them insight into layers of spatial and telemetric data. To do that, Autodesk needed to have integration tools to tap into, or export out to, the established systems, should that be CAFM, IoT, BMS, BIM, CAD, databases etc.
Tandem Connect is designed to simplify that process and comes with prepacked integration solutions for a broad range of commonly used BMS. IoT and asset management tools. This is not to be confused with other developments such as Tandem APIs or SDKs.
The application was acquired and so has a different style of UI to other Autodesk products. Using a graphical front end, integrations can be initially plug and play, such as connecting to Microsoft Azure, through a graph interface. The core idea behind this is to ‘democratise the development of visual twins’ and not require a software engineer to get involved. However more esoteric connections may require some element of coding. Bray admitted there was significant ‘opportunity for consultancy’ that arises from the whole connectivity piece of the pie and that a few large system integrators were already talking with Autodesk about that opportunity.
Bray explained that Tandem Connect enables not only data inflow and outflow but also ‘workflow automation and data manipulation’. He gave an example where HVAC settings could be read into Tandem Connect, and a comfort index could be written, which was demonstrated at Autodesk University 2024.
Product roadmap
Autodesk keeps a product roadmap which has been pretty accurate to show the development of travel, given the regular video updates.
Two of the more interesting capabilities in development are portfolio optimisation and the development of more SDK options, plus the possibility of future integration of applications. Portfolio optimisation will allow users to view data of multiple facilities in one central location and should provide analytics to predict future events with suggested actions for streamlining operations.
Beyond the current Rest API (Now), Autodesk is developing a full JavaScript Tandem SDK to build custom applications that leverage Tandem’s logic and visual interactivity. In the long-term, Autodesk says it will possibly enable extensions for developers to include functionality within the Tandem application itself.
Conclusion
Tandem development continues relentlessly. The capabilities that are being added now are starting to get into the high value category. While refinements are always being added to the creation and filtering, once the data is in and tagged and intelligently put into systems, it’s then about deep integration, alerts for out of nominal operation at a granular level, historical analysis of systems, spaces and rooms, all with easy visual feedback and the potential for yet more data analysis and intelligence.
Bray uses a digital twin maturity model to outline the key stages of development needed to realise the full potential of digital twin technology. It starts with building a Descriptive Twin (as-built replica), then Informative Twin (granular operational data), then Predictive Twin (enabling predictive analytics), Comprehensive Twin (what-if simulation) and Autonomous Twin (self-tuning facilities).
At the moment, Tandem is crossing from Informative to Predictive, but the stated intent for higher level functionality is there. However the warning is, your digital twin is only ever as good as the quality of the data you have input.
Some of the early users of Tandem are now being highlighted by the company. In a recent webinar, Brendan Dillon, director of digital facilities & infrastructure, Denver International Airport gave a deep dive into how they integrated Maximo with Tandem to monitor facility operations.
Tandem is an Autodesk outlier. It’s not a volume product and it’s not something that Autodesk’s channel can easily sell. It’s an investment in a product development that is quite unusual at the company. It doesn’t necessarily map to the way Autodesk currently operates as, from my perspective, it’s really a consultancy sale, to a relatively small number of asset owners – unlike Bentley Systems, whose digital twin offerings often operate at national scale across sectors like road and rail. The good news is that Autodesk has a lot of customers, and they will be self-selecting potential Tandem customers, knowing they need to implement a digital twin strategy and probably have a good understanding of the arduous journey that may be. The Tandem team is trying to make that as easy as possible and clearly developing it out in the open brings a level of interaction with customers that in these days is to be commended.
Meanwhile, with its acquisition of niche products like Innovyze for hydraulic modelling, there are some indications that Autodesk is perhaps looking to cater to more involved engagements with big facility owners, and I see Tandem as falling into that category at the moment, while the broader twins market has still yet to be clearly identified.
