Amongst the several options that have emerged to cater to the dynamic needs of infrastructure companies and utilities, a promising and multifaceted solution is Bentley Systems’ infrastructure “digital twins” technology software. The use of advanced solutions such as digital twins, which refers to a digital replica of physical assets, processes and systems, leads to better quality data and, in turn, better management and maintenance of assets.
In today’s world, significant changes are disrupting the traditional business models, compelling utilities to innovate rapidly. These changes are being driven by factors such as ageing networks, greater environmental demands, new customer expectations, and increasing fixed and working capital requirements. Thus, it is important to integrate engineering technology (ET), information technology (IT) and operational technology (OT) solutions across the value chain to remain relevant and economical.
Each year, Bentley Systems introduces a number of new digital twin services for asset and network performance as well as for digitalising cities. These innovative new services/solutions not only improve stakeholder and citizen engagement but also result in faster and better-informed decision-making that ultimately helps maximise asset performance. A look at some of the new technology announcements made by Bentley Systems at the recently held Year in Infrastructure 2019 conference…
AssetWise Digital Twin Services
iTwin Immersive Asset Service
The iTwin Immersive Asset Service provides immersive visualisation and analytics visibility, in a rich, interactive 4D digital twin context, for decision support to sustain and improve the performance of infrastructure assets. Its cloud and web services enable owner-operators to make infrastructure engineering information accessible and comprehensible to a wider population.
AssetWise 4D Analytics
AssetWise 4D Analytics uses advanced analytics and machine learning to provide insights into current conditions and trends, and to predict future performance. Data sources can include any information accessible to AssetWise including inspections, work history and extremely large data sets such as those from internet of things (IoT) devices. The results can be understood in the digital twin’s context using extensive graphing and dashboarding capabilities.
AssetWise Linear Analytics
Traditionally, the complexity of linear assets makes it hard to visualise and understand the vast quantity of data associated with these types of networks. AssetWise Linear Analytics takes data from many observed sources and aligns it, with engineering fidelity, to location and time on a linear network. Once aligned, using a library of linear network-aware data processing rules, users can identify trends and anomalies in rail or road networks. AssetWise Linear Analytics includes visualisation dashboards that provide users with instant access to all data at any location on the network.
OpenUtilities Digital Twin Services
Energy utilities are required to modernise their ageing infrastructure along with dealing with new challenges of distributed energy resources at the grid edge. OpenUtilities Digital Twin Services consolidate, validate and align ET, IT and OT information including network GIS, reality modelling, performance, simulation and other enterprise data across departmental and workflow silos. It enables organisations to identify data quality issues, visualise these issues on a map, and resolve issues using smart rules and machine learning. Predefined and user-extensible dashboards and analytics provide insights and visualisation for OpenUtilities digital twins.
Digital co-ventures for asset and network performance with Siemens
Siemens’ asset performance management solution for power plants speeds up the digitalisation of power plants and provides intelligent analytics with a range of innovative offerings and managed services solutions. Digital services for brownfield transmission and distribution networks leverages OpenUtilities Digital Twin Services for existing substation resilience, linking the substation model, reality context and asset data to provide access to vital information to reduce downtime and streamline problem identification and resolution, particularly in cases where substations are remote and difficult to reach. Another major announcement made by Bentley Systems was the introduction of new cloud services for infrastructure engineering digital twins. The engineering information allows users to understand and model asset performance in the real world over the asset’s life cycle.
New Digital Twin Cloud Services
iTwin Services enable engineering firms to create, visualise and analyse digital twins of infrastructure projects and assets. This solution merges digital engineering content from BIM design tools and multiple data sources, enables “4D visualisation” of digital twins, and logs engineering changes along a project/asset timeline, to provide an accountable record of “who changed what and when”. Today, engineering teams are using iTwinServices to conduct design reviews, validate design data and generate design insights. The iTwin Design Review service can be applied for ad hoc design reviews, and project teams using ProjectWise can add the iTwin Design Review service to their digital workflows to facilitate overall project digital twins.
PlantSight is an offering jointly developed by Bentley Systems and Siemens that enables owner-operators and their engineers to create living and evergreen digital twins of operating process plants. PlantSight allows operations, maintenance and engineering personnel to access trusted, accurate digital twin data immersively, including process and instrumentation diagrams, 3D models and IoT data. It provides a “single view of truth” in a validated information model that facilitates situational intelligence, line of sight and contextual awareness.
The iTwin Immersive Asset Service enables owner-operators using AssetWise to align asset performance data and operational analytics in their digital twins’ context, making engineering information accessible to a wider audience of users through immersive and intuitive user experiences. The iTwin Immersive Asset Service shows “hotspots” of activity and change in asset status over time for better decision making.
With digital twin cloud services, Bentley helps users create and curate digital twins to improve the operations and maintenance of physical assets, systems and construction processes, through immersive 4D visualisation and analytics visibility.
Infrastructure Digital Twins for Digital Cities
During the Year in Infrastructure event, Bentley Systems also showcased its new digital cities initiatives, applying digital twins for more efficient city and regional operations and for more connected and resilient infrastructure.
City-scale digital twins begin and are updated through 4D surveying and reality modelling by ContextCapture and Orbit GT to derive as-operated 3D models from photogrammetry (including from unmanned aerial vehicles) and/or point clouds. Reality modelling provides an engineering-precise, real-world context to support planning, design, construction and operations. Users of Bentley’s open applications – OpenBuildings, OpenSite, OpenRoads, OpenRail, OpenUtilities – can leverage this digital context to model new and improved buildings, roads, transit systems, tunnels, bridges, utilities and more.
The foundation context for any digital twin includes reality meshes, terrain models, imagery and GIS sources. Engineering models of buildings, streets, transit systems, utilities and other city infrastructure, both surface and subsurface, are semantically aligned and geo-referenced to enhance the richness and relevance of digital twins over time. Public works departments, property developers, utilities, transportation agencies and others have access to a full and current contextual view of the built environment. Engineering and architectural firms will be able to develop new services that contemplate updating and managing digital assets over their life cycles. Thus, cities will benefit from living and current digital twins of their infrastructure and surrounding environment.
Sustainability and Resilience Digital Twins
Now, cities can combine their surface and subsurface surveys and engineering data into cohesive 4D digital twins to ensure asset performance, resilience and sustainability. Using Bentley’s open simulation applications during asset life cycles, for example, as-constructed buildings can be evaluated for seismic resilience (STAAD), the evacuation of vehicles and people in stations, stadiums and other public places can be assessed and optimised, the impact of flooding events like hurricanes can be determined (OpenFlows FLOOD), and the suitability of subsurface conditions for urban projects can be ensured (PLAXIS, SoilVision).
Geotechnical digital twins: Introducing OpenGround
Bentley’s geotechnical engineering and analysis applications empower subsurface digital twins, critical for assessing and managing risks in infrastructure projects and assets. Subsurface digital twins entail modelling of the underground environment, including the geology, hydrology, chemistry and engineering properties, made possible by Bentley’s geotechnical offerings (PLAXIS, SoilVision, Keynetix and gINT). To further enable subsurface digital twins, Bentley announced OpenGround, a new cloud service to store, manage, report and share data on natural ground conditions.
Water network digital twins
Building upon its experience with hydraulics and hydrology software, Bentley is introducing OpenFlows WaterOPS for water and wastewater utility operators. OpenFlows WaterOPS provides water and wastewater utilities with real-time operational support, smart water response planning, and optimised performance and business intelligence, converging IT (GIS) with OT (telemetry, supervisory control and data acquisition [SCADA] instrumentation and sensors) and ET (hydraulic simulation). WaterOPS provides real-time operational decision support extending SCADA to help users monitor, maintain and forecast various hydraulics and water quality scenarios.
City planning digital twins
Digital twins for cities have many stakeholders, including constituents not directly involved in engineering or infrastructure. Now hosted in Microsoft Azure, OpenCities Planner delivers cloud-based, city-scale digital twins to improve stakeholder and citizen engagement and to simplify and facilitate urban development. Addressing a wide variety of potential use cases, OpenCitiesPlanner helps users, through devices like the web, mobiles, touchscreens and digital billboards, to intuitively visualise and explore 2D, 3D, GIS and other data aligned with the reality modelling of the city.
Conclusion
The technology initiatives introduced by Bentley Systems have in the past helped infrastructure companies and utilities improve their efficiency, reduce losses and meet the growing needs in a sustainable manner.
At Bentley’s Year in Infrastructure 2019 Conference, digital twin advancements featured in 24 finalist projects in 15 categories in project locations across 14 countries ranging from transportation, water networks and treatment plants, to power stations, steel plants and buildings. Overall, 139 nominations in 17 categories cited digital twin objectives for the innovations used in their projects – a significant increase from 29 such nominations in 2018.
In the years to come, these initiatives will go a long way in improving network and asset performance, making networks smarter and ensuring readiness for incorporating the latest technologies.