At the 2022 Year in Infrastructure (YII) Conference, Bentley Systems announced Bentley Infrastructure Cloud, its combination of enterprise systems that span the end-to-end lifecycle and value chain of the world’s infrastructure. Powered by the iTwin Platform and Bentley’s infrastructure schemas and thus seamlessly integrating with Bentley’s engineering applications, Bentley Infrastructure Cloud will enable better creation, delivery and ongoing operation of better infrastructure, through complete and evergreen digital twins.

Bentley Infrastructure Cloud encompasses ProjectWise, for project delivery; Synchro, for construction; and AssetWise, for asset operations. These enterprise systems now leverage digital twin technologies, powered by iTwin, to open up data contained in engineering files through automated and intrinsic mapping to Bentley’s infrastructure schemas. By advancing these enterprise systems to become fundamentally data-centric without disrupting file-based workflows, Bentley Infrastructure Cloud provides user organisations with significant opportunities to improve collaboration, productivity and quality.

Bentley’s infrastructure schemas are both open and extensible, and now link to reality modelling and IoT devices, and incorporate carbon calculation and subsurface data. The rich data representation of Bentley’s infrastructure schemas serves well the export of Industry Foundation Classes. The ability to share data seamlessly and to enrich it throughout the lifecycle helps engineering firms and owner-operators create and derive more value from their engineering data.

The potential for a unifying, cloud-based solution across the lifecycle of infrastructure engineering arises from the institutionalised limitations of fragmented information flows that have impeded connections, feedback, analytics, reuse and knowledge transfer. Bentley Infrastructure Cloud comprises a data-centric, always on, always current, always accessible federated environment that persists and relates engineering data throughout the span of design, construction and operations.

Information mobility and semantic continuity across traditional boundaries through Bentley Infrastructure Cloud will help accelerate, among other advancements, modular design and design for constructability, and performance-based design.

“Bentley Infrastructure Cloud stands for our commitment to connect everyone and everything in the infrastructure engineering value chain and extended project ecosystems. Infrastructure professionals deserve an evergreen digital twin environment for data that they can trust and act upon,” said Ken Adamson, senior vice president of enterprise systems at Bentley Systems.

“I believe Bentley Systems is uniquely positioned to fulfill this requirement by virtue of the combined comprehensiveness of our ProjectWise, Synchro and AssetWise enterprise systems, our software’s intrinsic engineering fidelity, and our commitment to openness – including our unique resolve to semantically integrate the full range of relevant engineering file formats. The iTwin Platform, in becoming the robust foundation for unifying all of our software development, has been proven equal to this challenge.”

ProjectWise, powered by iTwin

Bentley Systems also unveiled major enhancements to ProjectWise to extend its scope from work-in-progress engineering to full digital delivery. By supplementing each project’s sequential file-based workflows with data-centric information mobility and analytics across all projects:

• through new project portfolio and programme management capabilities, ProjectWise users can now apply analytics at the level of engineering fidelity across all projects, learn from and reuse rich project data, and retain knowledge to enhance the quality and efficiency of future projects; and

• through new digital twin capabilities, ProjectWise users can undertake interdisciplinary design reviews and advanced design validation to improve the effectiveness and quality of their designs, and also increase the richness of their digital deliverables for construction and operations, to position their businesses for transformational digital services beyond handover.

Powered by iTwin:

ProjectWise leverages iTwin Capture to integrate reality modelling data, increasingly the norm, to capture and monitor the digital context of designs, geospatially coordinated with engineering data;

ProjectWise leverages Bentley’s infrastructure schemas to semantically align design-file data across multiple disciplines for comprehensive design reviews, and across all projects to understand dependencies, and to reuse datasets, including for machine learning to develop proprietary analytics;

ProjectWise will leverage iTwin Experience to offer immersive visibility into project digital twins, assuring quality and improving performance;

ProjectWise 4D Design Review, powered by iTwin, enables users to securely share large, complex models with their entire project ecosystem, regardless of authoring applications. Reviewers can perform virtual walk-throughs, query model information, and analyse embedded property data using a simple web browser. A streamlined interface makes interdisciplinary review of 2D and 3D models easier and more accessible, and enables reviewers to see who changed what and when, through 4D visualisation;

Advanced Design Validation, powered by iTwin, includes 3D digital workflows, integration with Bentley’s OpenRoads and third-party applications, and AI/ML enhanced visualisation, enabling simulation of the driver experience to validate designs and assure requirements are met;

ProjectWise Components Centre, a cloud-based digital component management and library service with direct integration to engineering applications, drives standardisation, automation, and reuse of design objects to deliver projects faster and more reliably. Engineering firms can now leverage data from one design to another, capture lessons learned, create reusable components and truly industrialise their project delivery expertise; and

Digital Delivery capabilities leverage digital workflows to automate and manage the creation, exchange, and review of contractual deliverables including PDFs and Industry Foundation Classes, as well as digital twins. ProjectWise users can avoid wasting time manually assembling and sending packages, reduce risk by gaining visibility and traceability in deliverables workflows, and by automatically maintaining a comprehensive audit trail.

Powered by iTwin within Bentley Infrastructure Cloud, ProjectWise for digital delivery enhances engineering firms’ opportunities while minimising their risks, improving project performance and quality assurance. Infrastructure digital twins created in the design phase can be valuable to owner-operators as incremental project deliverables, including engineering firms’ recurring services as ‘digital integrators’ for data quality and security, proprietary analytics, and monitoring.

Lori Hufford, vice president, engineering collaboration at Bentley Systems, commented, “Engineering firms today face unprecedented challenges to deliver more and better projects despite scarcer talent, a retiring workforce and loss of institutional knowledge. By leveraging the iTwin Platform, we are now able to advance ProjectWise beyond engineering work-in-progress for one project at a time, to be used across all projects to maximise insights, learnings, and reuse, and for machine learning.

“ProjectWise users already have a wealth of project experience incorporated in their ProjectWise archives. Now as part of Bentley Infrastructure Cloud, ProjectWise can drive a necessary step-change in the efficiency, effectiveness and transformation of engineering firms.”

AssetWise, powered by iTwin

Finally, Bentley also announced the availability of new asset-specific solutions, powered by iTwin, that leverage iTwin Experience, iTwin Capture and iTwin IoT to deliver real-time asset health monitoring.

AssetWise Bridge Monitoring solution transforms traditional bridge inspections into a modern, digital workflow. By flying drones and using iTwin Capture to create a 3D digital twin of the bridge, inspections can be conducted virtually, avoiding costly and hazardous field trips, while tapping into expertise remotely and leveraging AI/ML to automatically identify and classify defects. Information is made available to stakeholders across the workflow via iTwin Experience. Inspection data required to correct issues can be seamlessly handed over to maintenance, design and construction to create substantial savings.

AssetWise Dam Monitoring solution is purpose-built for engineering firms to offer digital services to dam operators who are modernising their dam safety programmes to reduce risk and address growing regulatory requirements. The upcoming solution will provide unified access to sensor data and will be able to be deployed without the need for specialised technicians. Users can incorporate sensor data in any digital twin for a contextual view of real-time data and associated metrics.

Cory Baldwin, vice president, infrastructure IoT at Bentley Systems, said, “We want to enable engineering firms to become digital integrators for the infrastructure digital twins they create in the project delivery phase, and to curate performance digital twins for owner-operators. To accelerate these opportunities, engineering firms can now start quickly with iTwin Capture, iTwin Experience, iTwin IoT, and our AssetWise monitoring cloud solutions, ready to add their own branded proprietary and asset-specific analytics and service programmes.”

According to Bentley, AssetWise Bridge Monitoring and Dam Monitoring solutions are still in early access.

“We are working closely with engineering firms and asset owners and clearly understand that they want innovation without disruption. With Bentley Infrastructure Cloud, users of ProjectWise, Synchro and AssetWise accelerate their generational advancement to digital twins, but don’t jeopardise their existing workflows for engineering collaboration, construction and asset performance management,” said Michael Campbell, chief product officer at Bentley Systems. “Best of all, their existing project and asset files are the springboard to their data-centric future.”

All images: Bentley Systems

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