Indoor mapping and digital twins for new Saudi buildings

Vision 2030 has set off one of the largest building programmes anywhere: giga-project districts, new museums and cultural sites, stadiums for the 2034 World Cup, Expo 2030 venues, entertainment destinations, malls and logistics parks. Every one ends up with hundreds of drawing sheets and a new operating team that has never walked the building.

Our indoor mapping page explains the general approach. In Saudi projects the difference is timing: the map is most useful when it is built from the contractor’s drawings before opening, then handed to operations, rather than reconstructed years later.

Upload each floor as a DWG (AutoCAD R2004 to R2018) or a PDF. A DWG is placed as a picture at its real-world units; a PDF’s scale is read from standard sheet sizes. You then trace the parts that matter for operations — rooms and areas, walls (magic walls speed this up), doors, stairs, lifts and escalators, racks in back-of-house stores — and stack the floors in 3D.

During commissioning, a read-only share link with an expiry lets the main contractor, the fit-out contractor or the owner’s representative check the mapped floors without an account. At handover, the facility moves to the operating team’s workspace as it is: the room list becomes the backbone of the asset register, and RFID readers, BLE gateways and sensors are added later as data links on the same shapes.

That is how a map built for a contractor review ends up as the operating digital twin — see RFID and BLE tracking in Saudi Arabia for what usually comes next.

The Navigate button builds a walking route around walls and through doors, with turn-by-turn steps, in the viewer and on share links. A share page follows the visitor’s browser language, so a phone set to Arabic gets the Arabic, right-to-left interface. Room and exhibit names are your own text, so they can be written in Arabic, English or both.

Routes stay on one floor: stairs, lifts and escalators are shown with wayfinding icons and the visitor switches floors with the floor switcher. For a museum, mall or venue, a share link printed as a QR code at the entrance is often all the visitor needs — no app, no account.

In a mall, tenant units drawn as areas can be coloured from a simple table — let, in fit-out, vacant — and service corridors and loading bays sit on the same map as the public levels. In a logistics park, each warehouse is its own facility, grouped into one solution so the park manager sees all of them together, with built-in reports exported to PDF or Excel.