Future-ready Infrastructure Project Solutions

Author photo: Sharada Prahladrao
BySharada Prahladrao
Category:
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Summary

Bentley Systems’ Year in Infrastructure 2017 Conference Bentley YII 2017 in Singapore, October 9-12, was truly a mega event with a global gathering of close to 1,500 delegates. ARC Advisory Group was a Gold Sponsor. Bentley holds The Year of Infrastructure Conference annually to promote its message that the economy, the environment, and professions can be advanced only by advancing infrastructure. The Bentley’s mission is to advance research through its Building Information Modeling (BIM), Construction, and Reality Modeling “Advancement Academies.”

Singapore provided a dynamic setting for Bentley’s content-rich agenda, featuring the Bentley Advancement Academies, numerous track sessions, alliance partner sessions (Microsoft, Bureau Veritas, Siemens, and Topcon) that focused on collaborative solutions, and the dazzling Be Inspired Awards ceremony and gala. All were preceded by the keynote addresses that created an atmosphere of anticipation for the sessions to follow.

In his opening remarks, CEO Greg Bentley spoke about Singapore and its amazing infrastructure. The nation is harnessing technology to the fullest, creating more opportunities for innovation, building strong communities, and improving the lives of its citizens. A key part of this vision is connectivity. Singapore already has a mobile penetration rate of 150 percent and is preparing for the next generation of seamless connectivity.

Greg Bentley spbs2.JPGTalking about BIM, he said that, globally, the construction sector constitutes only 13 percent of GDP; the digital future of construction has a huge productivity opportunity of $1.6 trillion. Singapore is a favorable outlier and this could be attributed to BIM, he said. The larger opportunity is to be future-ready, which Bentley’s connected data environment is designed to support.

Greg Bentley highlighted projects from the 2017 Be Inspired Awards nominees that exemplify the BIM advancements made possible by embracing technologies and processes for “going digital.” He mentioned a few of the finalists: BP, Khazzan in Oman; Virtual Penn State Campus (Pennsylvania State University); RTA (Roads and Transport Authority), Dubai; Nagpur Metro, India; Klang Valley Mass Rapid Transport, Kuala Lumpur; Huadong Engineering Corporation, China; Hubei Electric Power Survey, China; Sanya New Airport Reclamation, China; Balfour Beatty, Cambridge, etc.

He said that land-constrained Singapore requires 3D cadastral mapping systems, as land ownership occurs in 3D; the Singapore Land Authority (SLA) – a previous Award winner – continues using Bentley’s solutions for this purpose.

The key takeaways from the Bentley event are:

  • Infrastructure is key to economic development

  • Digitalization creates a connected data environment

  • Collaboration among partners accelerates growth

Against this backdrop, Bentley Systems made several product announcements, but what received maximum attention was the announcement of its iModel 2.0 cloud platform and its first new service, iModelHub, to accelerate “going digital” for users of its ProjectWise Design Integration services. Keith Bentley, founder and chief technology officer, gave the technology keynote for this product introduction, followed later by an informal conversation on stage about the iModel 2.0 cloud platform with Bhupinder Singh, chief product officer.

According to the company, the iModel 2.0 cloud platform is both “evolutionary and revolutionary.”

iModel 2.0 Cloud Platform: Maintaining a Timeline of Changes

Bentley introduced this as the next-generation cloud platform for digital workflows in infrastructure projects. Keith Bentley positioned the services’ ability to automate change synchronization as a key differentiator. He said that iModelHub is a key part of the iModel 2.0 cloud platform, enabling an ecosystem of iModel-Keith Bentley spbs3.JPGbased applications and services. It provides a hub for engineering data and change in the connected data environment. Its timeline of changes facilitates automated digital workflows, synchronization of iModels, and insights into how the data is changing. He added that it will help users analyze trends within and across projects to reduce risk, and improve operational and organizational efficiency.

The key to project visibility is alignment (database queries and analytics only work when there is consistency), accountability (change must be welcomed and synchronized), and accessibility (to benefit authorized users/programs). According to the company, iModel 2.0 has consistent aligned semantics; its timeline of changes supports accountability and provides accessibility of data for diversely distributed workflows.

iModel 2.0 reportedly records all project changes on a timeline and, based on the user’s ProjectWise workflow configuration, notifies project participants about the availability of relevant changes. Change in data is the source of both value and risk in infrastructure workflows. With iModel 2.0, change is immediately accepted and synchronized across the value chain. iModelHub maintains a timeline of changes stored as a sequence of immutable ChangeSets that capture how, when, and by whom the engineering data has been changed. ChangeSets are:

  • Fine-grained—tracking change and attributing every changed value to its author in context

  • Semantically rich—enabling services to discover how the engineering data is changing in a meaningful way

  • Records of change—efficiently communicating changes among geographically distributed teams (connected and disconnected workflows)

In some engineering workflows, such as approval workflows, users may want to work with the older versions of information. iModelHub allows access to any version of the iModel along its timeline, and significant or milestone versions can be named. In a distributed work environment, a centralized database may not be the optimal solution for managing change in engineering data, or teams may need to synchronize with the larger project only at appropriate intervals. The iModelHub is suitable for these instances, as it is built for distributed cloud scale-out with services and clients using synchronized copies of any version of the iModel on their timeline.

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According to Bentley, this technology holds the “living history” of the physical and functional models of the asset. An iModel for design and construction becomes even more valuable after project completion – as it continues to evolve and reflect changes made to the infrastructure. By adding change synchronization and digital alignment to the connected data environment shared across ProjectWise and Bentley’s AssetWise operations services, iModelHub increases the value of digital workflows within and between connected projects, connected assets, and enterprise data lakes. The salient features of the iModel 2.0 are:

  • Architected from the ground up to manage change

  • Distributed relational database representing the changes

  • Distributed, cloud-based database

  • Existing workflows are bridged with iModelHub

Conclusion

Bentley’s Year in Infrastructure Conference succeeded in driving home the company’s message about the importance of “going digital” in BIM for project success. It also served to strengthen existing partnerships, disseminate knowledge about the company’s new offerings and solutions (the iModel 2.0 cloud platform in particular), and provide ample opportunities to network.

Since 2004, the Be Inspired Awards program has recognized more than 2,000 of the world’s most outstanding infrastructure advancements, encompassing all types of infrastructure projects. This was a record-breaking year, with 409 nominated projects from 340 organizations and submissions from 52 countries across 330 cities (submitted in 10 languages). The finalists represented 51 projects across 47 cities in 20 countries. Interestingly, this year, 49 percent of the project submissions were from the Asia Pacific region.

This annual Bentley-hosted event helps the company engage with its customers and other participants in a collaborative environment. For the Be Inspired project finalists, it provides the opportunity to showcase their efforts and, for the audience, it is a great learning experience.

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Keywords: Bentley Systems, Year in Infrastructure 2017, Singapore, iModel 2.0, iModelHub, BIM, Digitalization, ARC Advisory Group.

 

 

 

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