With a digital twin, municipalities can create, visualize, and analyze a city-wide digital twin of its infrastructure. City stakeholders gain new insights by modeling and simulating real-world situations, optimizing systems and processes, and monitoring the performance and condition of assets. Using examples from innovative and award-winning infrastructure projects around the world, Bentley executives will provide insights into how these organizations are leveraging digital context, components, and chronology to embrace a data-driven approach for city and campus infrastructure from planning through performance. In addition, Bentley will also discuss its recently announced OpenGround, a new cloud service (available end of 2019) to store, manage, report, and share data about natural ground conditions.   

Smart City Expo World Congress 

19-21 November 2019

Fira Barcelona Grand Via

Av. Joan Carles I, 64, 08908 L'Hospitalet de Llobregat

Barcelona, Spain

Booth location: Gran Via, Hall 2, Level 0, Street B, Stand 223 (within the Microsoft booth)

Bentley Systems representatives will be on site to discuss digital twins and digital twin workflows for infrastructure to support smart city use initiatives:

Jerry King – Vice President, Strategic Channel

Phil Christensen – Senior Vice President, Business Development, Digital Cities

Ton De Vries – Senior Director, Business Development, Digital Cities

Hakan Engman – Director, Business Development, Digital Cities

Frank Braunschweig – Senior Product Manager, Water and Wastewater

Advancing BIM and GIS to 4D with Digital Twins

At its annual Year in Infrastructure 2019 event, Bentley Systems presented its new digital cities initiatives, applying digital twins for more efficient city and regional operations and for more connected and resilient infrastructure. Digital twins converge assets’ 4D-surveyed and engineering representations to enable new collaborative digital workflows serving planners and engineers in public works, utilities, property management and development, and city stakeholders. Digital twin cloud services provide an intuitive and immersive 4D environment converging digital context and digital components with digital chronology for “evergreen” infrastructure digital twins over asset lifecycles. For infrastructure professionals, BIM and GIS are effectively advanced through 4D digital twins.

Infrastructure Digital Twins for Digital Cities

City-scale digital twins begin and are updated through 4D surveying and reality modeling by ContextCapture and Orbit GT to derive as-operated 3D models from photogrammetry (including from UAVs) and/or point clouds. Reality modeling provides engineering-precise, real-world context to support planning, design, construction, and operations. Users of Bentley’s open applications (OpenCities, OpenBuildings, OpenSite, OpenRoads, OpenRail, OpenUtilities) can leverage this digital context to model new and improved buildings, roads, transit systems, tunnels, bridges, utilities, and more.

City Planning Digital Twins

Digital twins for cities have many stakeholders, including constituents not directly involved in engineering or infrastructure. Now hosted in multiple Microsoft Azure regions,  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, OpenCities Planner helps users, through devices like web, mobile, touchscreens, and digital billboards, to intuitively visualize and explore 2D, 3D, GIS and other data aligned with the reality model of the city. 

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 modeling 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 introduces OpenGround, a new cloud service (available end of 2019) to store, manage, report, and share data about natural ground conditions.

Sustainability and Resilience Digital Twins

Now, cities can combine their surface and subsurface surveys and engineering data into cohesive 4D digital twins to ensure over time their asset performance, resiliency, and sustainability. Using Bentley’s open simulation applications during asset lifecycles, 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 optimized (LEGION and CUBE), 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).