SINGAPORE, beginning of October (bv). In the run-up to this year’s international user conference, Bentley Systems (Exton, US state of Pennsylvania) invited 130 press representatives from 28 countries to an corporate update. In his keynote, CEO Greg Bentley introduced among others the extended partnerships with Siemens, Microsoft and Topcon.
As Mr Bentley pointed out, the alliance with Siemens is about accelerating the digitalisation in infrastructure-focused industries such as power, water/waste water, and railways. Some new applications are released as a first step in this partnership with the Siemens Energy Management division. These jointly developed applications will aid users by enhancing Bentley’s network management, design, and operations applications with new integrated analysis, design optimisation, and distributed energy resource decision support capabilities. As part of this initiative, Bentley Systems’ OpenUtilities applications will be integrated with Siemens’ Power System Simulation (PSS) suite. In a two-years time frame, both vendors will integrate their products so that these capabilities are available in a single unified environment.
Also announced were the new ProjectWise Connect Edition cloud services, supported by Microsoft Azure. The Azure-based services complement ProjectWise Design Integration service, ‘a proven workhorse for work-sharing across collaborating engineering teams’ as Mr Bentley said that can be deployed on-premise, as a cloud service, or in any hybrid operation mode. By virtue of the shared Azure platform, project delivery organisations using both ProjectWise Connect Edition’s new ‘365 Services’ and Microsoft Office 365 will increasingly benefit from digital workflows between their engineering work processes and enterprise productivity tools. Along with those offerings, Bentley’s connected data environment, shared between ProjectWise and AssetWise, now includes Components Center, ContextShare, ConstructSim Completions, and innovative iModelHub services (see more below).
Also at The Year in Infrastructure 2017 conference, Topcon Positioning Systems and Bentley Systems announced that they have joined efforts to provide opportunities for construction industry professionals to learn best practices in ‘Constructioneering’ as Mr Bentley it expressed in his speech. Meant by this term is a process of managing and integrating survey, engineering, and construction data, in order to streamline construction workflows and improve project delivery. “The growing momentum in demand for infrastructure project delivery across the world, against finite resources including an aging construction workforce, makes ‘going digital’ imperative,” the CEO explained.
The partnership enables engineers to begin work with an accurate 3D model of current construction site conditions (as captured by Topcon’s UAS photogrammetry and laser scanners) which then can be processed into 3D reality meshes provided by the ContextCapture software. Cloud services convey the engineers’ work directly to construction processes in the field. The resulting 3D models work with the 3D machine control that guides construction machinery.
Start of a mega event
On day one of YII2017, the day after the press update, Siemens’ CIO Dr Helmut Ludwig said in his keynote: “Siemens and Bentley recognise the unprecedented opportunity that ubiquitous connectivity brings for assets with digital engineering models. Siemens PLM has a head start in what we call the Product Digital Twin, Production Digital Twin, and Performance Digital Twin. Combined with Bentley’s BIM portfolio we will especially take the Performance Digital Twin to a new level, and we can accelerate realising the full potential of digital cities, such as here in Singapore.”
Dr Ludwig’s presentation illustrated the approach Siemens takes to integrating and digitalising the entire customer value chain in general, and as a particular example, he described the advances for connected asset visibility that can be achieved with the integration of Siemens and Bentley technologies. In a fictive workflow, a process plant was captured, through digital photography, in its as-operated state with Bentley’s ContextCapture software, providing immersive visual context of the plant. That 3D Production Digital Twin was then linked to the IoT-enabled components (Greg Bentley: ‘Digital Components’) in the operating plant via MindSphere, Siemens’ Cloud-based, Internet of Things operating system. Using Bentley’s AssetWise, the MindSphere inputs were configured in a browser, and in the context of the 3D model, as the user navigated the Performance Digital Twin to query asset health of various components—in particular a motor vibrating to failure. That Digital Twin of a replacement motor was accessed with Siemens PLM software, and bespoke motor mounts designed and analysed to solve the vibration problem — and then 3D-printed. The same logic can be applied to Digital City scenarios, so that through such connected asset visibility, engineering problems can not only be detected but also solved, leveraging fully digital workflows to improve asset performance.
iModel 2.0 for Industry 4.0
Co-Founder Keith Bentley (left in our picture on the top) introduced jointly with Bhupinder Singh, SVP Bentley Software, the brandnew ‘iModel 2.0’ Cloud platform and its first new service called iModelHub: Without requiring changes to existing BIM applications or processes, the iModelHub invokes application-specific ‘bridges’ triggered automatically by ProjectWise. iModelHub takes the advantage of Microsoft Azure Cloud services to enable a totally connected project by synchronising all checked-in project changes, and automatically updating a composite project iModel for comprehensive and continuous design reviews, highlighting progress and risks in digital workflows across disciplines.
iModelHub journals all project changes on a timeline, and notifies project participants, based on their ProjectWise workflow configuration, about the availability of relevant changes. Participants can choose to synchronise (or not) to and from particular timeline milestones and can analyse and interpret the impact of ongoing changes. Read more in a corresponding whitepaper.
The winner takes it all…
The outstanding event honoured once again the extraordinary work of Bentley users advancing infrastructure design, construction, and operations throughout the world. Ten independent jury panels comprising distinguished industry experts selected the 51 finalists from more than 400 nominations submitted by Bentley’s clients in more than 50 countries. More details in upcoming issue of d1g1tal AGENDA 4/2017 in the section ‘CAPITAL PROJECTS’.
