When will the software in the construction industry usher in the wave of localization?

Technology is becoming a national border.

On March 4th, Autodesk, the world's largest 2D and 3D design and engineering software company, announced that it would suspend its business in Russia. Autodesk said that it will immediately suspend its activities in Russia and fully abide by all existing sanctions. With the development of the situation, Autodesk will also consider additional restrictions on this business.

Autodesk is a famous industrial software company. Its AutoCAD (Computer Aided Design) software, which was born in 1980s, is used for 2D drawing and document design, and Revit, which was born in 1990s, is used for 3D BIM (Building Information Modeling) design. Now it has become the most popular drawing modeling tool in the world. If Autodesk continues to stop operating in Russia, Russian industries that use AutoCAD in large quantities will face great trouble.

Under the heated discussion, one of the main battlefields of CAD, the construction industry, which accounts for one-third of China's GDP (202 1 26.4 trillion yuan for the construction industry, and related real estate fields 18 trillion yuan, totaling more than 40 trillion yuan), has a more urgent demand and voice for industrial software autonomy. Everyone is expecting that with China's worldwide achievements in cloud computing, artificial intelligence, big data and other technical fields, can domestic industrial software overtake or even change lanes with the help of new technical forces in the new era, and usher in the glory of China's construction industrial software?

Every process of modern industrial production is inseparable from the participation of industrial software, which is also the key link for Industry 4.0 to move towards intelligent manufacturing.

However, on the road of building industrialization, the gap between China and foreign developed countries has expanded several times.

At an industry summit forum on 20 16, Zhou Fulin, then an academician of the Department of Civil Water Conservancy and Architectural Engineering of China Academy of Engineering, said a set of figures: "At present, the industrialization of buildings in China is only 3%-5%, that in Europe and America is 75%, that in Sweden is 80%, and that in Japan is 70%." Prior to this, the degree of building industrialization in China was only 3%-5%. Even by 2020 (the end of the 13th Five-Year Plan), the target set by the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development was only 15%.

This gap makes China's construction industry in a weak position when competing with foreign countries. What's more, China's construction industry encountered difficulties in industrial software when it went digital.

In terms of time, the development of domestic industrial software in the construction industry is even several years earlier than the introduction of foreign industrial software into China. As early as the early 1990s, CAD (Computer Aided Design) software enterprises appeared in China. The foreign Auto CAD software was popularized in China's architectural design institute and other institutions in the middle and late 1990s.

Although it started early, domestic industrial software was suppressed for a long time in the face of the fierce foreign industrial software. One figure can explain this sense of loss: in 20 18 years, in the field of CAD R&D and design software, more than 80% of the R&D and design software market in China was occupied by foreign companies.

The formation of this situation is not only related to the barrier factors of foreign software construction, but also related to the restriction of domestic software environment on domestic software.

First of all, as we all know, foreign industrial software in the field of construction began technical research and development as early as 1950s and 1960s. After decades of development, it has formed a deep technical threshold and format discourse right on products. However, the domestic construction industry software has only a short history of 20 or 30 years, and it has been suppressed and banned by foreign software giants in the development process, and has been in a weak position at the starting line.

Secondly, in recent ten years, China's industrial informatization and digitalization have tended to "emphasize hard over soft", paying attention to hardware investment, but not enough attention to software R&D, and even pirated software flooded for a time, which further hit the enthusiasm of software enterprises for R&D investment.

Third, industrial software must be closely integrated with the actual needs of industrial technology. China's industrial development history, including the construction industry, is also shorter than that of foreign developed countries, and its industrial accumulation and industrial base are obviously weaker than those of developed countries. When the foreign construction industry has evolved from informationization to digitalization, the construction industry in China has just begun to move from manual and mechanized to network and digitalization. However, the technical difficulty of industrial software often lies not only in the "software" itself, but in how to combine "industry" with "software", which often requires cross-border talents to effectively combine both ends. In the past, the state of attaching importance to manpower over technology made China's construction industry and software industry lack the soil to cultivate such talents.

It is these four barriers that limited the competition between China's industrial software and foreign software products in the past, and finally had to hand over the market share of core industrial software in some fields.

Although the development of software in China's construction industry has experienced various troubles in the past twenty years, a new opportunity has emerged.

At the 20021and1China Digital Architecture Summit, Huang Zeng, the former mayor of Chongqing and an outstanding professor of Fudan University, said, "As a pillar industry of China's economic development, the construction industry still has huge development space in the digital age. But this space can never be achieved by building a house or repairing a high speed. " This shows that decision makers have realized the importance of building digitalization. But the reality is that this digitalization still faces many challenges.

Huang believes that there are three main obstacles to the digitalization of the current construction industry. First, the upstream and downstream industrial chain of the construction industry is long, with many participants and long investment cycle. The data and information formed in each link of the industrial chain are difficult to flow with the project, forming an information island that is not easy to interact.

Second, a single project involves a large number of engineering teams, especially small and medium-sized engineering teams, with uneven quality, rough management granularity and great difficulty in informatization promotion.

Third, in addition to the challenges of the construction industry itself, the level of industrialization, digitalization and intelligence in the whole process of construction is low.

According to the statistics of China Architectural Association, the proportion of China's building informatization investment in the total output value of the construction industry is only 0.08%, while that of developed countries in Europe and America is 1%.

The huge gap has stimulated practitioners and decision makers in the domestic construction industry. Building "industrialization, digitalization and intelligence", as the development point of new building industrialization, has become an industry knowledge.

First of all, from the demand point of view, China's construction industry has been a labor-intensive industry for a long time, supporting the employment of hundreds of millions of laborers. However, in recent years, problems such as population aging have become more and more serious, and the construction industry has also begun to change. At the same time, with the increasingly complex requirements of construction projects in the dimensions of "economy, applicability, beauty and green", the delivery time is also accelerating, and the traditional extensive operation mode of the construction industry has become increasingly unsustainable.

Secondly, from the perspective of technical reserves, technologies such as cloud computing and AI have made great progress in China, and even achieved world-leading advantages in some fields, and all walks of life have begun digital transformation.

Finally, from the perspective of policy promotion:

Obviously, policies on accelerating the intelligentization of the construction industry and promoting new industrialization have been introduced more and more frequently. From the initial "emphasis" to "mastery" and then to "popularization and application". The clearer the policy, the more urgent the will.

Looking at the present, from June 5438 +2022 10, the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development issued the "Tenth Five-Year Plan" for the development of the construction industry, which defined the goal of a more stable position of the building pillar industry. Including promoting digital collaborative design, vigorously developing prefabricated buildings and building an internet platform for the construction industry; At the same time, promote the general contracting mode and develop the whole process engineering consulting service.

In this development plan, "intelligence" appears 30 times, "BIM"18 times, "assembly" 15 times and "digitalization" 13 times.

The plan also points out that the previous extensive model of the construction industry still has problems of low development quality and efficiency, such as extensive development mode, low labor productivity, high energy consumption and high emissions, irregular market order, low overall construction quality and frequent engineering quality and safety accidents.

Looking at the development of the industry from the perspective of policy orientation, an investment promotion practitioner in the real estate industry said: This is a process from quantitative change to qualitative change. In the past, we took more land and didn't pay attention to quality. Now the probability of taking land is small and we want to make a profit. We must do a good job in quality and make works. "Starting from the land, zero change in construction and no delay in delivery" is a true portrayal of the current industrial ideal.

Under the dual effects of tension and thrust, the east wind of construction industry reform has arrived, which also brings historical opportunities for the rise of construction software in China.

The development of the times requires every link of the industrial chain to be upgraded, and the whole construction industry is still in the shock period before the formation of the new normal.

In different stages of construction projects, we can see that different generations of production tools are widely used: in the design stage, some people develop plug-ins based on foreign CAD and BIM software to help improve the efficiency of drawing and modeling; Some people write the code of architectural design in python, and then show the lightweight architectural information model on the web. Some people began to try to use the latest intelligent technology tools for man-machine cooperation. In the construction stage, there are also many ways, such as on-site pouring, 3D printing of robotic arms, prefabricated construction and so on.

Under such an opportunity, the digitalization of the construction industry will also usher in a multi-faceted flowering pattern. Demand will push more and more new and old companies to enter the software market of construction industry.

At present, in the attempt of localization of software in construction industry, the path chosen is different. A large class of enterprises choose the domestic alternative path, mainly referring to replica CAD and replica BIM, to create a set of software that can replace the existing CAD and BIM drawing modeling tools. Typical representatives include Zhongwang CAD, Guanglianda BIMFACE, PKPM-BIM series software, etc. Another kind of enterprises choose to take the improved application path, that is, secondary development and lightweight based on CAD or BIM, including various computer generation, CAD and BIM plug-ins. The second development threshold of the latter is lower than that of the first kind of domestic replica, so it is also the direction for most enterprises to participate in at present.

In addition, there is a completely different direction: neither copying nor improving, but reconstructing a new generation of digital language in the construction industry with cutting-edge technology from the perspective of the underlying language.

Its representative is Xiaoku Technology, which was founded on 20 16. As one of the first enterprises to enter the field of building intelligence, it chose this path of subversive innovation that no one has ever taken: rooted in the practice of local building engineering, starting from the know how and deep insight of the construction industry, and on the basis of understanding industrial productivity and production relations, it independently defined the basic language of multi-generation building digital intelligent software from the application end to the bottom of data structure.

He, the founder of Xiaoku Technology, used to be a senior architect and master doctor of OMA, and studied the cross direction of architecture and algorithm. His view is that to realize digitalization and intelligence of the construction industry, we must first solve the core pain points of data production and application.

The industry often cares about how data should be applied in all aspects of the industrial chain, but ignores data production. The source of data production in construction industry is design.

In the field of engineering, design is the process and result of a project from scratch, which vividly expresses abstract ideas as graphics, models and a series of data. However, the completion of the design does not mean the generation of data, because the results of the current design are geometric information mainly based on graphics and models, lacking the data dimensions needed for data applications in all aspects of the industry in the digital age. He believes that the first step in the digital and intelligent upgrading of the entire construction industry is to stay in the "design" of "data production". Therefore, only by realizing the intelligence of the design end first can the data source of the whole industry be guaranteed.

The solution proposed by Xiaoku Technology is a brand-new architectural digital language-ABC, which refers to BIMing on the AI-driven cloud intelligent building information model, that is, the forward design mode of automatically generating BIM in the cloud through artificial intelligence.

In ABC mode, first of all, the design process will be assisted by artificial intelligence, and through the organic combination of algorithm, data and computing power, the design production efficiency and output quality will be greatly improved. For example, it used to take 1-2 weeks to complete the design cycle of 2-3 schemes, and the efficiency was improved to 1-2 days to complete 20 compliant and available schemes, and the efficiency was improved by 90%.

Secondly, through the intelligence of the cloud, the parallel production of all stages and links is realized, and all data production in the virtual space is completed in advance, which improves the overall control of the project; For example, in the stage of land auction, we can accurately understand the spatial quality and return on investment under different schemes, thus helping to determine the global optimal solution.

Finally, relying on the powerful connectivity of the cloud, all the terminals of different production links are connected together to achieve efficient online collaboration. For example, in the past, different types of jobs could only exchange information fragments in traditional file formats such as drawings, tables and report texts. Now, collaborative design of a project can be completed online through QR code or link.

Based on this logic, ABC mode realizes the integration of "data-model-rule specification", which not only can automatically and efficiently solve the dirty work by machines, but more importantly, it creates a low-level language mode that can be efficiently produced and disseminated.

On this basis, since the release of the world's first cloud-based one-stop intelligent design product "Small Library Design Cloud" for architects in mid-20 17, the small library has gradually extended to "AI solution for small library real estate" for upstream project parties and "intelligent assembly engine for library buildings" for downstream general contractors. That is to say, based on the same set of underlying logic, that is, its unique ABC model with integrated digital and analog control, Xiaoku Technology builds an intelligent building digital business system covering the upper, middle and lower reaches of the industrial chain from pre-construction planning, mid-construction design and post-construction assembly.

In other words, "customers don't want the small library to just provide them with a tool, but will consider the integration from the direction of fundamentally transforming their entire organizational structure or workflow into digital intelligence", Yang Xiaodi said.

Standing at the crossroads of industrial transformation, the digital future of the construction industry is full of imagination.

First of all, the construction industry is the pillar industry of our national economy. According to the data of the National Bureau of Statistics, the gross output value of the construction industry in 20021year was 29.3 trillion yuan, and the added value of the construction industry was 80 138 billion yuan, accounting for 7.3% of the GDP. In other words, the construction industry, which has not yet been digitized, is already a trillion-dollar market.

In addition, with the country's efforts on new infrastructure, the upgrading of the construction industry also undertakes the important task of promoting the transformation of China's economic model. As we all know, the traditional infrastructure is railways and highways, which led to the expansion of China's construction industry in the past; The new infrastructure includes 5G, data center, artificial intelligence and industrial Internet. Relying on these smart facilities, the past buildings will become smart buildings, provide smart services and become an important carrier of the digital economy.

In the different paths of software exploration in the construction industry, the direction of subversive building intelligence is very imaginative. In addition to Koku Technology, in overseas markets, Spacemaker, headquartered in Norway, and Archistar, an Australian company, have also chosen the path of disruptive innovation. It is worth mentioning that the former Xiaoku Technology was established a few months later. It launched its first product in the middle of 20 19, and was acquired by Autodesk for 240 million dollars more than a year later.

This means that China has formed its own unique advantages on the road of subversive software innovation in the construction industry.

It can be expected that with the structural changes in China's construction industry, with the blessing of new technologies such as AI and cloud computing, domestic construction industry software will also usher in its own spring.