Geo-Engineering News - Year In Infrastructure - YII2019

Another year of amazing stories, innovations and collaborations! YIIXNUMX has kicked off with a huge buzz in Singapore this time with the theme focusing on progress towards digital with a digital twins approach. The event is promoted by Bentley Systems and strategic allies Microsoft, Topcon, Atos and Siemens; who present value-added solutions together in the framework of the trends of the fourth industrial revolution applied to geo-engineering, mainly in the areas of engineering, construction, industrial production and management of digital cities.

The cities, the processes and the citizen.

Personally, after 11 years of intermittently participating as a press or jury at this event, the industry forums have been what I value the most. Not because something new is learned specifically, but because this exchange allows us to see where things are going. Nothing that is not happening in other industries, but basically this year is marked an orientation to processes and the citizen as the center of attention; It would not be strange that all the IT tools of this company are simplified to these topics, on a shared modeling and interoperability platform.

The six forums of this event are:

1. Digital Cities: This year this is my favorite, which is committed to giving a direct setback to the competition by saying that the assets in the city go beyond GIS + BIM. The value proposition is in presenting connected systems and integrated flows instead of multiple solutions, aligned with the portfolio grouping that we have seen in the last year and the new acquisitions that instead of thinking about the integration of engineering data management models and geospatial, they seek to simplify the modeling of cities from a holistic perspective, thought about integral processes of what people are busy managing in a city: planning, engineering, construction and operation.
2. Energy and Water Systems: This forum is focused on the challenges of resource consumption behaviors and the preparation of conditions to sustain the growth of demand. The value bet is on how better decisions can be made from holistic management of distribution networks, supply through automated management.
3. Railways and Transit: Automated construction mechanisms, immediate information for decision-making, input management and cost reduction under the management of the life cycle of existing assets and expansion based on urban growth will be discussed here.
4. Campus and Buildings: This forum seeks to discuss and pose the challenge for the simulation of times and movements of people. Additionally, how digital management can lead to transformations of urban mobility solutions.
5. Roads and Bridges:  This will show how you can re-design the construction processes and procedures using the mechanisms of digital construction and simulation.
6. Industrial Infrastructures:  This is a fairly mature forum in PlantSight's solutions for the operation of optimized projects in gas, oil and mining systems.

The maturity of alliances

It has been a masterful teaching how a company that was family-controlled, instead of going public, proposed to strengthen its assets to take its ingenuity towards the next revolution in the industry, hand in hand with leading companies in the engineering (Topcon), operation (Siemens) and connectivity (Microsoft). In recent years we saw what ProjectWise will be with the reach of the Azure network, as well as PlantSight towards the entire industrial production market.

This year, the surprise was no less, with the Bentley Systems - Topcon joint venture, focused on creating new construction methods based on technology and simplifying processes. This solution did not come out of the sleeve of the shirt, but is the result of more than a year of research and collaboration of more than 80 participants between government organizations, private companies and professionals who had already been using IT solutions, equipment, procedures and good practices in the life cycle of large infrastructure projects. This was managed through Constructioneering Academy, and the result is Digital Construction Work DCW

Digital Construction Works, It is open to all types of businesses in the trend of the fourth industrial revolution, but specifically in the construction sector, companies can improve their construction projects - through the use of digital workflows - in conjunction with the team of experts from DCW, which in turn will provide digital automation and the so-called "twinning" service.

Having this symbiosis materialized between client-company, Digital Construction Works, Bentley and Topcon, in turn, will seek to prioritize their investments in terms of improvement and redesign of construction engineering software. Greg Bentley, CEO of Bentley Systems couldn't put it better:

“When Topcon and we recognized the opportunity for Constructioneering to finally industrialize the delivery of capital projects, we respectively committed to completing their software requirements. In fact, our new software capabilities make it possible to build digital twins: converged digital context, digital components, and digital timeline. What remains, as infrastructure construction goes digital, is for the people and processes of builders to take advantage of the technology. We and Topcon have committed many of our best resources, experienced construction and software professionals, to serve shoulder to shoulder, in virtual headsets, to innovatively advance the required digital integration. The Digital Construction Works joint venture has the full management and capital commitments of our two companies, leveraging their unique strengths to help harness the potential of Constructioneering to bridge the world's infrastructure gap."

More from Digital Twins

The Digital Twin concept comes from the last century, and although it could have been resurrected as a fad, the fact that industry leaders with this influence on technology and the market move it again, guarantees that it will be an irreversible trend. Digital Twin is very similar to level 3 of the BIM methodology but now it seems that they will be the Gemini Principles that will mark the route line.

In the ProjectWise 365 update -which uses Microsoft 365 and SaaS-based technology- the web-based services - cloud- and the use of BIM data are expanded, allowing services such as iTwin to remain available for all types of revisions and at all levels for all types of companies. In a broader sense, with ProjectWise 365 those involved in the project can manage everything related to the project (store designs, manage collaborative workflows, or exchange content).

Users –professionals- can access iTwin Design Review, in order to link up with the project in an inverted way, navigating between 2D and 3D views. Now, those who will use this tool for projects, with their ProjectWise integration, it is possible to change the digital twins of the project, keeping track of where and when the changes occurred. All these features will be available later this year 2019.

“The project's digital twins for construction and infrastructure engineering move forward with these announcements, particularly with our new cloud services. Users of ProjectWise, the #1 BIM collaboration software in ARC's new market study, have made Bentley one of the largest users of Azure ISVs. We're expanding our instant-on web-based ProjectWise 365 cloud services; make iTwin cloud services widely available for both professional and project-level design reviews; and greatly expanding SYNCHRO's reach through cloud services. The delivery of infrastructure projects is fundamentally based on time, as well as space. Bentley's 4D project and construction digital twins are driving digital advancement for infrastructure engineering, today, around the world! ” Noah Eckhouse, senior vice president of project delivery for Bentley Systems

As for cloud services SYNCHRO Bentley Systems users can generate models to manage the execution of projects, data in the field or in the office, as well as views of all tasks, models and even maps that effectively promote data capture and minimize the risks of occurrence some incidence To all of the above, the integration of augmented reality with Microsoft's Hololens 2 is added, resulting in 4D views of project designs, that is, 4D visualization of digital twins.

New acquisitions

Bentley Systems family joins technologies such as Global Mobility Simulation Software (CUBE) - Citilabs, analysis (Streetlytics), and other related to the management of geospatial data, Orbit GT from the Belgian provider Orbit Geospatial Technolgies - which offers 3D mapping software, 4D topography, data collection by drones.

These acquisitions are part of an integrated advanced technology, with which urban digital planning can be improved. Acquiring data from cities through drones, based on the 4D - Orbit GT- topography, entering the data in applications such as Open Roads - Bentley and generating simulations with CUBE, a conglomerate of existing road asset data is obtained and close to be built, with which the real world is modeled.

The modeling of reality with these tools, allows to identify the status and performance of structures and infrastructure, - this one of the objectives of these acquisitions. After obtaining all the reality data, with the Bentley cloud service, those interested can access this data, validating the digital twins.

“We are excited to be part of Bentley Systems. Our customers and partners will have a fantastic opportunity to fully integrate the planning, design and operation of multimodal transportation systems. At Citilabs, our mission has been to enable our customers to harness location-based data, behavioral models, and machine learning through our products to understand and forecast movement in our cities, regions, and nations. and projected travel to improve the design and operation of tomorrow's mobility systems." Michael Clarke, Chairman and CEO of Citilabs

In short, an interesting week awaits us. We will publish new articles in the following days.