Going Open and Digital Twin Cloud Services Shape Bentley Year In Infrastructure 2018

The Bentley Year In Infrastructure Conference held in London this year at the Hilton London Metropole attracted over 1,200 attendees, a record number for that location and event. The company advanced its theme of “Going Digital” with the inauguration of Digital Twins and iTwin Services. iTwin Services are digital twin cloud services for infrastructure projects and assets, that can be transparently provisioned within Bentley’s Connected Data Environment (CDE) for ProjectWise and AssetWise users.

Bentley Year In Infrastructure 2018 Awards Ceremony and Dinner

A large number of acquisitions were announced at this conference. Three of these acquisitions further the new iTwin Services effort.

Acquisitions include:

Siemens and Bentley announced PlantSight digital twin cloud services, a solution to enable up-to-date, as operated digital twins, synchronizing the real plant and its engineering representations, for greater efficiency in process plant operations. Additionally, disparate data sources can be integrated to create holistic digital context for aligned digital components.

The two companies have also announced a joint technology and service solution, to speed up the digitalization of power plants and provide intelligent analytics with a range of innovative offerings and managed services solutions, called Asset Performance Management (APM) for Power Plants. This new service, hosted on Siemens’ cloud-based open IoT operating system, Mindsphere, will combine Bentley’s advanced asset performance software solutions with Siemens’ complementary technology and service knowledge to empower power plant owners to access fully digitalization, which ultimately will improve maintenance operations and planning.

Atos, a global digital transformation leader, and Bentley announced a strategic partnership by which they plan to offer a complete solution to create and operate digital twins on behalf of industry and infrastructure asset owners.

Bentley acquired Stockholm-based Agency9, a company that has provided nearly half of Sweden’s larger municipalities with city-scale digital twin cloud services for city planning and related web-based 3D visualization. The new iTwin cloud services not only add digital alignment and change synchronization for infrastructure engineering digital twins, but enables, with the acquisition and integration of Agency9 CityPlanner, the OpenCities Planner that will meet urban planning requirements with greater detail.

While not an acquisition, Bentley announced integration availability between ProjectWise 365 Services and Microsoft 365. This collaboration brings analytics from Microsoft SharePoint and Microsoft Power BI, Microsoft Teams and Microsoft Flow collaboration to be applied to mainstream automated digital workflows within ProjectWise.

Another announcement (not an acquisition), Topcon Positioning Group and Bentley announced new developments in the constructioneering workflow initiative. This year’s conference marks the first anniversary of the launch of the Constructioneering Academy initiative of the Topcon and the Bentley Institute.

iModel.js

Going “Open”

Significant change this year was the shift to Open applications with MicroStation at the center of the Comprehensive Modeling Environment with the launch of OpenSite Designer, an application for the design and construction of civil site projects; OpenBuildings that assembles AECOsim building design and Speedikon factory and industrial design applications. Also announced was the availability of OpenBuildings Station Designer for designing rail and metro stations.  Additionally, Bentley announced OpenBridge Designer, a combination of bridge modeling, analysis and design capabilities and OpenFlows FLOOD, a flood analysis and early warning system. Basically all products are evolving to an open source format.

These products will be followed by OpenCities, OpenPlant, OpenComms, OpenUtilities, OpenSite, OpenRoads and Open Rail.

CEO Greg Bentley gave a keynote on Wednesday, speaking about “industrializing BIM.” He said that the UK wants to go beyond BIM to the Digital Twin. Bentley is industrializing project delivery including construction in 2018, including processes as well as components.

Bentley CEO Greg Bentley

Open applications are the way to go with this, and Bentley wove in their work with Siemens energy analysis and resource applications for Webwehaus.

“In connecting workflow we want to automate digital workflows,” said Bentley. “Digital workflows bring together surveying and engineering, becoming ‘conceptioneering.’ Construction moves to constructioneeirng. Topcon and Bentley join together to provide more cloud services.”

All digital workflows have the “eering” suffixes as above and “operationeering,” wherein the Connected Data Environment (CDE) implements ProjectWise and AssetWise.

Meeting the finalists

Digital Twins, iTwin Services and iModel Hub

The addition of Digital Twins, with iTwin Services, are an outgrowth also of the iModel technology.

• A digital twin is a computer model which mirrors and simulates an asset of a system of assets and their surrounding environment.
• Digital twin models can help organize data and pull it into interoperable formats so that it can be used to optimize infrastructure use.
• Digital twins can also share the data with defined levels of access, to inform better decisions about which future infrastructure to build and how to manage current and future infrastructure.
• A digital twin is a virtual representation of a physical object or system across the lifecycle, using real-time data to enable understanding, learning and reasoning, according to Gartner.

What it can be used for is the application of analytics, artificial intelligence and machine learning in simulations and decision support throughout the lifecycle of design, construction and operations.

iModel Hub and iTwin Services

Adam Klatzkin, senior director of Bentley iModel technologies, said that every asset must have a foundation and so must its digital twin. “The iTwin is constantly changing, providing accessibility for key workflows, while not being disruptive to current workflows.

PlantSave uses the Digital Twin and Digital Twins are powered by iModel Hub based on GitHub. The iModel Hub is used on the U.K.’s 330-mile-long HS2 high-speed rail project.

“There is no shortage of dark data,” said Klatzin. “We want design engineers to work in software they are comfortable with. We want to open dark data, so we can communicate effectively and use it.”

Qualities include:

Design change – “By embracing change we hope to have better understanding of design. We can understand using iModel, synchronized change, figure out what might have changed and identify problems.”

Risk mitigation – “We can now associate GIS and BIM and other information. This reduces latency between unidentified risks.  By being able to visualize risks within the 3D environment, we know where risks lies.”

Design Insights – “Providing visibility into and improving understanding of design, impact of design, changes on costs, schedule, health and safety can inform our decisions.”

Integrated with Power BI – This enables the understanding of the impact of design decisions.

Benefits of the iModel give greater understanding of design data, specifically ensure consistency, better identification of opportunities for design efficiencies and design for manufacturing.

iModel.js Library

While the concept of connecting systems isn’t new, CTO Keith Bentley takes that concept a little farther each year by extending technology to be able to achieve that objective more completely.

Bentley CTO Keith Bentley

He announced the new iModel.js library open source library. iModel.js utilizes the same Javascript library source code that Bentley uses to create their own products for users to do their own customization.

The three axes of the iModel and iModel Hub:

• Alignment – If you had a digital twin that represented all engineering information it would come from many sources including from tools. “Each tool without information that created it is dark data. By storing it in a database we can view and interrogate it,” said Bentley. “Alignment is really the biggest issue we’re working with.”
• Accountability – “Instead of lamenting fact that everything changes, we should embrace change. Let’s store the change instead of the result of change. iModel Hub creates a journal of everything that happens on a project. We need an accounting system for the engineering system.”
• Accessibility – “Last year we didn‘t get deep into this,” said Bentley. “Digital twins has all information you had in it and you could trust it. You wouldn’t want the digital twin to become a bottleneck. In cloud computing, you make copies to make it scalable. We make many copies of iModel and keep them synched.” 

The Future of Infrastructure

Sir John Armitt, Chairman of the National Infrastructure Commission, spoke on how we need to minimize the impact of climate change and its causes and the need for more infrastructure to address it.

Sir John Armitt, National Infrastructure Commission, UK

“Every five years we make a recommendation on infrastructure, to cover transport, energy, waste, water, flood,” Armitt said.

Some of Armitt’s talking points bear repeating here:

“Digital twins are inevitable.”

“Politicians follow; they don’t lead. They follow the opinions of people in this room.”

“In the UK, 50 percent of funding for infrastructure will come from private investment.”

“There’s a wall of money out there looking for good projects.”

“Why not use something besides steel and concrete for building? There must be other materials.”

“Building uses fundamentally the same concepts from one project to another.”

“We all pay for infrastructure, the government doesn’t pay, it’s our money. We have to make sure the money is used in the most constructive way.”

Travel, lodging and some meals for the Year in Infrastructure Conference were provided compliments of Bentley Systems.

Bentley YII 2018 Awards

Tags: 3D, 3D cities, AEC, architects, architecture, Bentley Systems, BIM, building design, building information modeling, Cloud, collaboration, construction, design, engineering, generative design, infrastructure, laser scanning, Open BIM, point clouds, visualization

Categories: 2D, 3D, 3D PDF, 3D printing, AEC, AECCafe, apps, architecture, Bentley Systems, building information modeling, civil information modeling, Cloud, collaboration, construction, construction project management, engineering, field, field solutions, file sharing, GIS, IFC, infrastructure, Internet of Things, IoT, lidar, mobile, openBIM, plant design, point clouds, project management, reality capture, rendering, simulation, site planning, sustainable design, terrain, TopCon, traffic simulation, visualization, Year in Infrastructure 2018, YII 2018

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 25th, 2018 at 11:38 am. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.