LONDON / UK, mid of October (bv). Bentley’s Year in Infrastructure Conference (YII) is a global gathering of executives all around the globe representing infrastructure design, construction, and operations. Since 2005, this conference format – slightly changed in 2009 – has been providing a dynamic setting for a really content-rich agenda – some might regard it as ‘information overload’ – featuring Going-digital strategies and, for this year for the very first time, the digital twin of infrastructure.
In a nutshell, the digital twin is a living, up-to-date image of the real industrial plant or any infrastructure in operation. However, the digital twin of a process plant differs significantly from that of a machine or an automobile. All in all, there are five distinct categories of information that contribute to the digital twin: attributes that characterise the layout; process-related behaviour; connectivity (how are individual components linked together?); activities (what’s going on during plant operation); and events (temporary incidents such as shutdowns for maintenance or changes in operations).
The actual three-day event was preceded by a Mediaday, at which 125 members of the press were given a corporate update. On that day, in addition to the keynote speech from Bentley’s CEO Greg Bentley, industry-specific insights were presented. For example, Oil & Gas, Process & Power, which I attended.
Greg Bentley highlighted the so-called iTwin Services, digital twin cloud offerings for infrastructure projects (‘project digital twins’), and assets (‘performance digital twins’). The corresponding services can be provisioned within Bentley’s Connected Data Environment (CDE) for ProjectWise and AssetWise users.
To realise the potential of the application of analytics, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) in simulations and decision support, representations of assets need obviously to be digital — but to be safely relied upon as a twin there must be practical solutions for their synchronisation to changing actual conditions in the real world. Moreover, merely capturing and representing physical conditions, including IoT inputs, can never be sufficient to understand, analyse, or model intended improvements, without also comprehending the ‘digital DNA’, as Mr Bentley it expressed, captured in the project or asset’s engineering specifications. To actually be worthwhile, therefore, would-be digital twins for existing infrastructure must reliably synchronize reflections of both an asset’s physical reality, and its virtuality in terms of engineering data. A digital twin can meet this requirement by geospatially converging the digital context (representing the physical) and digital components (representing the virtual), naturally resulting in an immersive environment for both visualisation and analytics visibility. For that approach the vendor has its portfolio around the reality modeling, iModelHub, CDE, and web-visibility technologies restructured and extended.
Reality Modelling
A representation of any infrastructure asset’s physical reality can now be reliably captured and maintained through increasingly continuous surveys and Bentley’s reality modelling software, providing digital context in the form of ‘reality meshes’. Overlapping photographs and (as needed) supplemental laser scans, largely from drones and ground-level imagery, are processed to generate spatially-classified and engineering-ready reality meshes at any desired level of accuracy — within which each digital component can be automatically recognised and geospatially referenced. The reality mesh can provide an immersive visual twin to intuitively navigate for finding, viewing, and querying the associated information within, or related to, the asset’s digital engineering models.
iModelHub within the Connected Data Environment
The challenge in capturing and maintaining these engineering counterparts of the physical asset is the opacity of their existing representations, compounded by continuous changes. iModelHub, introduced on last year’s YII in Singapore, overcomes these hurdles through automated digital alignment (to achieve semantic consistency from other data sources), and synchronisation, based on change ledgers, corresponding to the CDE’s project workflows (ProjectWise) or configuration management (AssetWise).
Once populated and synchronised by way of digital context and digital components, iTwin services deliver their benefits through the vendor’s new open-source iModel.js library for web-based immersive visualisation. The community can easily develop custom applications that connect their digital twin for specific use cases by leveraging a vast open source ecosystem. In addition, a geospatially immersive environment for city-scale digital twins is now available through Bentley’s new OpenCities Planner services.
Project digital twins
ProjectWise Connect Edition CDE users can instantiate cloud-provisioned iTwin Services without disruption to their existing ProjectWise workflows. iModelHub will then create and maintain the project’s comprehensive iModel: A distributed database, with its intrinsic change ledger updated at each deliverable-in-progress check-in state. For each such update to engineering information, application-specific ‘information bridge’ processing effectuates digital alignment of the iModel’s digital components. To the extent of available reality modelling for the physical site, the CDE’s corresponding ContextShare service maintains updated digital context. The iModel’s digital components and ContextShare digital context are immersively merged through Navigator Web and iModel.js visualisation, as authorised and secured by iModelHub.
The iModel.js library supports functionality to create and curate iTwins fit for particular asset performance purposes. This enables AI and mixed reality technologies to be advantageously applied throughout an asset’s lifecycle, and across assets.
Also at the conference, Greg Bentley together with Eckard Eberle with Siemens announced the PlantSight Digital Twin cloud services. PlantSight is the trademark of services with regard of Comos and OpenPlant capabilities. It will provide increasingly comprehensive as-operated digital twin services, to incorporate AssetWise APM with MindSphere, and Teamcenter, for asset performance modelling. And to accelerate owners going digital, Atos and Bentley announced a new strategic partnership to create and curate performance digital twins. More news from the event to come.
