Bentley Systems: Geospatial, Civil Engineering and the Digital Twin

Francois Valois, vice president, Civil Engineering with Bentley Systems spoke at Bentley’s recent Civil Design Virtual Press Briefing about the current state of civil engineering and how we now need to do things differently. Civil infrastructure will continue to need to accelerate, according to Valois. “There has been an enormous infrastructure deficit over the years. Any time we stop accelerating we make the problem worse. Now we have social distancing, and funding challenges. Projects may be funded by a special tax on gas, for example. In addition to this, we have to stay home and when we’re onsite we must have less people onsite and find new ways to work. Our answer is the digital twin, and helping our users to go digital.”

Digital Bridge

As an example of growth, Florida will invest US$2.1 billion on civil. How resilient is building construction? Most states are business as usual. Florida can take advantage of low flow on highways to do construction.

The digital twin encompasses the reality of the design information, geospatial information, the analysis information, unstructured information, dark information and CAD files, all being available to the world.

“This combined with new sensors being added to new or old infrastructure, as well as geotechnical sensors being added, new information coming in on a constant basis help us make decisions at a rapid pace,” said Valois.

“The Digital Twin is a living thing that starts in design and construction as a twin of what it’s to be,” said Valois. “This goes into the construction phase, and you may find changes that need to go back to design preconstruction. Now that you can’t go onsite as much as you want, adding drones and other tools may be helpful.”

For operations, the digital twin gives a twin of how to operate.

“We need to get the help of the entire industry in order to get technology to work together,” said Valois. Bentley’s open technology imodeljs.org is available to make sure data is in the same place and for the next 50 years and beyond.”

A new iTwin Partner program for third party providers helps them with solutions that will make them successful to pass on that success to others.

The press briefing included a sampling of customer stories:

Bentley, AECOM, Foth and Lane Construction

Mo Harmon, director, industry strategy,  Bentley Systems spoke on “A Deeper Perspective,” noting the Federal Highway Administration’s “Every Day Counts” program for design build, UADs, state-based drives innovation across DOTs, all the way to advancement of UAVs.

Other parts of the world have also been actively delivering digital delivered concepts. FHA framed it and the State Transportation Innovation Council (STIC) provides a way to fund innovations, and help DOTs move innovations forward.

The UK government pushed BIM level 2 in 2016. Germany, Australia France have also been actively adopting digital delivery concepts.

The State Transportation Innovation Council provides $100,000 annually to help fund and move those innovations forward.

Another industry driver is Design Build Authorization for Transportation for 2020. “We have only six states today that have limited ability for adoption,” said Harmon. This organization shares data and facilitates collaboration with remote and dispersed teams.

“Bentley has responded quickly with ProjectWise 365 instant on cloud-based service, providing it at no cost to any individual or firm until September 2020,” said Harmon. “ProjectWise 365 allows stakeholders to find, share and conduct project reviews, and maximize information for work at home teams.”

Many customers are at the base level of migrating to the Digital Twin, while Bentley continues to build intelligent 3D models with Open Road, Open Bridge, Open Rail, and Open Site applications that support and drive that effort.

“Issues won’t be solved by doing things the same way,” said Harmon. “SYNCHRO will help deliver more efficiently and address issues such as lack of productivity and safety on the jobsite.”

Questions to be asked in the current state, are, what critical staff needs to be onsite and how do they get data back and forth from their home base?

SYNCHRO 4D Construction

SYNCHRO will enable contractors to not only share and collaborate data but deliver projects with improved profits.

Kevin Cornish, PE, senior vice president Design Consulting Services, Surface Transportation, AECOM, based in Florida, talked about Digital Collaboration.

“I oversee our service transportation business in the Americas,” Cornish said. “Most everybody knows AECOM is in three global geographies. We use a tremendous amount of software and Bentley products on a global scale.”

AECOM reported approximately $20.2 billion of revenue in fiscal year 2019, is in five regions in North America, with transportation their largest business line.

“We have a large number of those 20,000 people working remotely right now,” said Cornish. “AECOM was very agile and had a lot of remote working tools in place. We were able to adapt rather quickly for remote working. Our offices remain open for the most part but our employees are encouraged to work remotely at home. I know a lot of staff are looking forward to getting back into our offices and working collaboratively.”

“Our clients are in transit, aviation and highway, impacts on ridership and therefore revenue that government is dealing with. Most importantly our clients and owners want to keep projects moving. They are working with the paradigm shift of working remotely. We try to give people confidence to continue to deliver our work.”

“A lot of people are working in teams but you need connection to your team, contact with managers,  a reliable IT infrastructure, ability to access design files and other information without VPN limitations, and a collaborative work environment in spite of separation. AECOM is accomplishing that right now.”

Aaron Moniza PE, senior client manager, Foth Infrastructure and Environment, LLC, spoke on the topic, “Going Digital – A Roadway Project Story.”

Foth is very proud of the Bentley 2019 Year In Infrastructure Award for their Foth Transforms, Connects, and Revitalizes Cedar Falls, Iowa Corridor Cedar Falls, Iowa project in the category Roads and Highways.

The $40 million project transformed a 2 mile 6 lane high speed corridor with failing infrastructure, safety issues and mobility deficiencies into a four lane complete streets corridor  with improved safety increased operational efficiencies, created multi-modal linkages and spurred economic vitalization of this corridor.

Going digital working collaboratively among multiple disciplines and executing workflows across disperse communities was critical to the success of the University Avenue project. Now working remotely is more important than ever.

As is the case for many of today’s infrastructure investments, this was a high visibility project, with political and stakeholder influence, necessitating on-demand access to accurate information. “The owner requested a fast track schedule, which required the need for our design to move efficiently,” said Moniza. “To execute, we had multiple phases, multiple teams, working across multiple locations with enhanced collaboration required. Finally there was a high level of public engagement and scrutiny critical to delivering the project. We worked together for over five years to execute this endeavor. It was important to have the right communication and design application, working closely with owners. Using open BIM and reality modeling, our team used multiple data acquisition applications including drone and mobile scanning for fast accurate data collection. The team put th

at data to work by establishing 3D models in an open connected data environment using ProjectWise, that helped connect, manage and store over 20,000 files in 122 GB data among the geographically dispersed teams. It helped consistency in document management digital workflows and file naming and we could find data we needed in minutes vs. hours.”

During design phase the team used the audit trail extensively for design management. They could find root cause of issues to find when and by whom the error made.

Andy Kayala, vice president, Engineering, Lane Construction spoke about the company’s focus on infrastructure and attaching a real schedule to the model. Lane Construction is ranked as one of ENR’s Top Highway Contractors, and has built more than 17,000 miles of highways and 150 bridges in its nearly 130-year history. It provides reliable and long-lasting infrastructure that moves people seamlessly throughout the country.

Tags: 3D Laser Mapping, Bentley Systems, cloud, data, imagery, Infrastructure, intelligence, laser scanner, LiDAR, location, mapping, maps, mobile, mobile mapping, navigation, reality modeling, remote sensing, satellite imagery

Categories: analytics, asset management, Bentley Systems, Big Data, Building Information Modeling, citizen science, climate change, cloud, cloud network analytics, data, developers, disaster relief, drones, emergency response, geoinformatics, geomatics, geospatial, GIS, handhelds, integrated GIS solutions, laser radar, mobile, photogrammetry, remote sensing, resilient cities, sensors, Year In Infrastructure 2019

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