Update on Bentley Systems’ Buildings and Campuses 

Eduardo Lazzarotto, Bentley Systems, Director, Product Management and Susanne Trierscheid, Bentley Systems, Senior Director, Facilities Engineering spoke with AECCafe Voice regarding their new releases in the latter part of this year. Their biggest product is OpenBuildings, within the Buildings and Campuses portfolio of Bentley.

Eduardo: Our latest release happened at the end of August. Two big things: one was improved structural elements in OpenBuildings Designer, which is converting structural elements into ProStructures elements. ProStructures is a structural detailing application, in Bentley’s portfolio. It increases the level of development for projects for architects and engineers and also makes it easier for them to connect their building projects to other applications like structural simulation and structural detailing in other workflows within Bentley.

We also released a product called OpenBuildings Energy Simulator, a free part of Open Buildings, a consolidation of a brand we had in the UK, Canada and Australia that was called HevaComp in the past. It enables users to simulate energy consumption in a building in early stages so heat gain and heat loss and also issue all the documentation for ASHRAE, LEED and other certification of that building.

We also released two new products: one for the Czech Republic and one for Russia with localized interface and datasets. We have new users and projects being delivered. We continue to invest in the architectural and mechanical part of the product, so new enhancements around stairs, curtain walls and quite a lot of functionality architects and mechanical engineers use today.

How has Covid changed what you are now doing?

Eduardo: Beginning in March, we began to spend a lot of time on social distancing enhancements for our Legion application. Legion is the product that does people movement simulation. We did made it easier to model and analyze those social distancing scenarios, understanding evacuation of buildings, circulation of people inside buildings, distancing and all different scenarios that came with Covid this year.

There are a few things around Covid – Bentley has a global campaign called “Bentley Has Your Back” where we gave free access to some specific tools that we believe could help architects and engineers to adapt to infrastructure with social distancing and Covid requirements. ProjectWise 365 there is a collaboration project management and operation platform where different stakeholders like Architects and engineers can do design review sessions and manage their projects completely offline or remotely and work from home and work from different spaces into those projects.

Legion is available until the end of November for free, that pretty much enables architects and engineers to simulate social distancing for all the different enhancements for buildings to be prepared for Covid. We have a lot of functions for designing and preparing the building for better operation during Covid so we have airflow simulation with the Energy Simulator Application that enables the architects and engineers to test the building for new requirements for circulation of air inside spaces. We also have GenerativeComponents that enables design automation for facility changes and quick layout assessment. We have clash detection inside OpenBuildings Designer that can enable architects to test different distribution of furniture and test for social distancing.

Are there new technologies for airflow circulation since Covid?

In terms of airflow we have always done our Energy Simulator program. It is aligned to the ASHRAE standards and they released an increased circulation guideline that we are actually using at the moment, so users can deliver those plans using Energy Simulator now.

Susanne: Maybe the big topic is Digital Twins and how we are enabling users to deliver new workflows by connecting the data they have today in the BIM workflow into digital twin, enhancing or upgrading their BIM projects into Digital Twins. Greg Bentley talked about it yesterday (at the Bentley Year In Infrastructure 2020 Conference), those Digital Twins enable you to simulate multiple future scenarios, and asset reliability operations moving as well.

To me, it was the first time Bentley spoke about the Digital Twin as something more than a technology used by large organizations. It sounds like it is now available for smaller organizations. Has the technology for digital twins changed significantly?

Susanne: I think there is a change of mindset accelerated by the pandemic because it was more visible at this time. It’s more convenient if you have virtual access to all areas of a building. For example, if you can check if it can be repurposed, like resilient buildings, and can it work if the parameters change. Now we sit further apart, and maybe one year from now, people who work from a home office don’t want to go back full time to work in an office. Will parts of the buildings in the cities become redundant? Do they need to be repurposed for residential and for those having a Digital Twin of any size is important. Even if you go down to smaller sized buildings, it’s very powerful if you can analyze it.

This situation has really accelerated the view of the Digital Twin and the importance of the Digital Twin. We are always trying to drive technology and are far ahead of our users because it’s affecting the area we’re in anyway. This mindset change of the past half year we couldn’t have achieved that. Of course, we don’t like the pandemic, for us as technology provider it hasn’t been all bad, as this mindset would not have changed or happened so fast otherwise.

With Covid, people were obliged from day one to work from home, and do collaboration scenarios that they had been required to do in an office situation. Things had to be done very quickly, such as can you transfer your license and do you have the same access to servers? The collaboration ability that we had to provide and that now enables part of the “Bentley Has Your Back” campaign, works for us internally. We have been working that way for years. But for our users being forced to work like that, we were able to move technology to online collaboration and we managed to do that pretty quickly. Other than that, our apps are able to do that, it just wasn’t used as widely as it is now.

Will you phase out any products as a result of Covid?

Eduardo: No, we won’t be phasing out any products as a result of Covid. There are products that we would phase out anyway as per aging. We are integrating core technology into OpenBuildings anyway and getting rid of redundancies.

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