liNear

Amid the growing demand for increased productivity and infrastructure value while saving resources and energy, digitization is emerging as the cornerstone of the building industry. In such a scenario, Building Information Modelling (BIM) system has become the enabler of digital construction, enabling stakeholders in construction projects to collaborate and communicate efficiently. Nevertheless, many mechanical electrical and plumbing (MEP) design engineers feel overwhelmed by the complexity of BIM. The challenges are even more in collaborating with other design engineers and using holistic data. liNear is a company on a mission to help MEP engineers leverage BIM for their comprehensive needs. Just like an MS Word user is little concerned about the data structure that drives the software, liNear believes an MEP engineer should be free from the hassles of managing multiple data formats in BIM. “With our solutions, we hide the complexity in working with data formats by optimally structuring the data beforehand,” says Manfred Waluga, CEO of liNear. “This enables users to collaborate with other process users, technologies, as well as data and achieve the desired results quickly and easily.”

Today, MEP engineers are under increased pressure to accelerate their planning and design of high quality buildings. To that end, liNear brings all the resources required for design in a single work environment.

So the engineers can manage the conceptual design and as-built models, including all specific and standardized calculations in one environment. liNear integrates multiple applications seamlessly to transform building model into “single source of truth.” Although the company avoids interfacing different applications to prevent loss of data quality, it supports the important interfaces, IFC and BCF, for collaboration and longterm archiving of building models. liNear, together with their industry partners, creates separate data sets for products such as radiators, thermostatic valves, air outlets and pipe systems in addition to CAD libraries. This helps in automating data entry and process execution, e.g. selecting the correct variants of a selected model series. liNear supports seven languages and country-specific compliance standards, thus, the designs for heating, cooling, waste water, potable water can be approved by the government agencies after thorough evaluation, without any difficulty.

More than just offering the vast product features of Revit and AutoCAD, liNear has built innovative solutions on those platforms. Rather than building more ribbons and buttons, it has created a new user interface, a dialog sidebar for AutoCAD and Revit. This sidebar speaks MEP engineer’s language. That means, the engineer simply selects the type of task, the specific location, and the type of plan. With these selections liNear creates in the background the perfect view, presents the right set of tools, and guides the engineer through the design process.

Besides developing an intelligent algorithm to detect heating or cooling calculations from building models, liNear has created MEP-specific toolsets and calculations in its solutions. It also offers a CAD browser for product selection, configuration, and parts lists. These are sorted based on manufacturers and article numbers, which make them ideal inputs for tender programs. What sets liNear apart from other CAD libraries is the quality and completeness of the data which it regularly updates, checks together with industry partners, and makes that available to all users free of charge.

liNear’s solutions have already been used in countless projects, such as Formula 1 circuit in Abu Dhabi, Tropical Island in Berlin, and the Grand Tower in Frankfurt, where decentralized heating and cooling systems with more than 300 km of panel heating pipe and 400 dwelling stations were realized. Focused on innovation, liNear has launched liNear Building Labs, an R&D department dedicated to innovative planning in the building industry. The company, with its products and services, aims to prove to the world that BIM is the logical evolution of the traditional working methods into a new paradigm driven by model-based design, collaboration, and data sharing.