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With the world’s population predicted to reach 8.5 billion by 2030, increased urbanization remains a powerful twenty-first century mega-trend, and with responsibility for two-thirds of the world’s energy consumption, and 70 percent of its emissions, our cities and urban environments have a pivotal role in addressing global environmental and social issues at a local level.

The goal of delivering future-ready infrastructure that minimizes carbon emissions, adapts to future patterns of work, removes community barriers, and supports new business practices is reliant on going digital. To succeed, the organizations and professionals involved must grasp the opportunity technologies including digital twins, the internet of things (IoT), artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) provides, empowering users to deliver self-sufficient districts and 5 min city quarters while achieving net-zero targets.

Bentley is helping cities enable a sustainable future through infrastructure Digital Twins to better plan, design, construct and operate real-estate networks, optimize urban planning, and empower clean energy transition while striving to meet net-zero targets.

Bentley users are embracing iTwin technology to Connect, Combine, and Manage Enterprise Data, Visually immerse teams through a single, spatial view of operational assets, and Gain Insight and Improve Decisions to make cities, campuses, airports, ports, and urban environments more inclusive, safe, resilient, and sustainable.

Take a look at these extraordinary infrastructure projects to learn how Bentley users, including finalists in our 2023 Going Digital Awards in Infrastructure, are leveraging our latest technology to make cities of tomorrow more sustainable, cost-effective, and accessible.

Siemensstadt Square - Sustainable construction with CO2 neutral operation in Germany’s capitol, Berlin.

Innovation hub with state-of-the-art character with more than 1 Mio. Sqm floor space. The site will cover more than 70 ha of future Berlin

Siemensstadt Square is a 25-year sustainable smart urban development project in Berlin that requires transforming more than 70 hectares of brownfield area into a modern, carbon-neutral campus, including approximately 100 new, low-emission buildings and cutting-edge mobility concepts. The large-scale, long-term project involves numerous stakeholders that will evolve throughout the project progression, presenting communication, collaboration, and data management challenges. To address these issues, vrame Consult needed to establish a dynamic digital twin foundation capable of managing multi-sourced data in an integrated environment.

Vrame Consult selected Bentley’s iTwin technology to establish a digital blueprint of the campus, supported by a common data environment using ProjectWise and OpenCities Planner as a fully accessible portal for all relevant 3D BIM and GIS information. The integrated digital twin solution provides all project participants, stakeholders, and the public rapid access to trusted information that can be contextualized and repurposed. With open, interoperable technology and asset ontology, vrame Consult has established a scalable digital foundation to attain the 25-year vision of Siemensstadt Square.

City of Pau: Revolutionizing urban planning.

Streamline traffic, reduce air, and noise pollution

As part of the transfer (demolition/reconstruction) of an unsanitary island called “Îlot Batsalle”, the Pau Béarn Pyrénées Agglomeration benefited from a land acquisition opportunity allowing it to consider the development of the crossroads located at the intersection of main road arteries in the city center.

The objective of this 4,5€ million project is to improve mobility by encouraging the center bypassing through a 720-meter public transportation lane network, to reduce traffic, air and noise pollution, while enhancing the image of the city entrance and introducing more green zones that will promote the area's biodiversity.

Sustainable Future of Mobility and Transport

MIND, providing Optimal Mobility with Minimal Environmental Impact, Milan.

The Milano Innovation District (MIND) is an urban regeneration project on the former Expo 15 site that focuses on sustainable mobility, overcoming traffic congestion and environmental pollution. Systematica used CUBE to explore how a 60,000-inhabitant, mixed-use campus can be effectively integrated with Milan’s transportation infrastructure.The project is creating new and effective dialogue with technology providers and mobility operators to explore and identify the most suitable solutions not just for this district, but for other cities moving forward.

“The suite of transport simulation codes that CUBE provided advanced [our capability] to model complex MaaS paradigms based on walkability—a crucial dimension to ensure the actual sustainability of any urban development. Modeling the MaaS paradigms was also based on the public’s response to current and future mobility patterns, which allows us to deliver a high-quality built environment, now and in the future.”Diego Deponte Partner and Managing Director Systematica Srl

Foth Transforms an Imaging Project into a City-scale Digital Twin of Perry, Iowa

Digital Twin Helps Rural Town Initiate and Fund an Array of Projects that will Improve Quality of Life

The City of Perry hired Foth to evaluate street and sidewalk conditions using mobile LiDAR scanning to improve access for citizens. The project quickly morphed into a citywide digital twin project to support the city’s capital improvement plan (CIP), presenting technical challenges for digitalizing over 60 miles of streets and 10 miles of alleyways. Foth needed integrated technology to process voluminous geospatial data, aerial images, and point clouds, and provide digital accessibility to multiple stakeholders.

Leveraging Bentley’s open modeling applications, Foth developed an optimal plan to deliver the digital twin, saving significant time and potential rework. The 500-gigabyte 3D city model contains approximately USD 598 million worth of asset data. The digital twin provides potential investors with a portfolio of data about historical structures, making them more inclined to invest in Perry and helping increase private investor engagement by 50% over the next five years. Having a digital twin enables Perry to gain support and enact its CIP 60% faster, increasing its ability to secure city funding by 75%.

Kaunas Digital Twin: Sustainability and energy efficiency driven projects.

Project focuses on the digitalization of the built environment by giving emphasis on University campus central and all city areas, using Bentley OpenCities as their main project platform.

The project developed by the Kaunas University of Technology (KTU) Faculty of Civil Engineering and Architecture Centre for Smart Cities and Infrastructure (CSCI) team, is focused on the digitalisation of the built environment, by giving an emphasis on the University Campus, Old Town, and central areas, using Bentley iTwin platform.

The CSCI mission is to build, sustain and develop a community focused on smart cities and infrastructure, advancing the field through lifelong learning, research and innovation. The project implements state-of-the-art digitalisation technologies such as reality scanning (photogrammetry, lidar), Internet of Things (IoT), BIM, 360panorama photos, machine learning and other technologies.

Greater Hobart Digital Twin

Housing affordability, urban renewal, and a lagging transport system.

The City of Hobart is undergoing record growth in numbers of visitors and new residents. This growth increases the pressure on the region’s social infrastructure, housing affordability and services, and the natural environment. The City is now developing a Digital Twin, integrating many data sources that give government, industry, and the public a better, integrated understanding of the current and planned environment, by addressing key strategic and infrastructure challenges such as housing affordability, urban renewal, and a lagging transport system.

A Business Case prepared by the Smart City Working Group of the Hobart City Deal along with external consultants predicts a return to the Hobart region of several hundred million dollars over the coming decade on an initial investment of around $10 million.

Sydney Airport: Ensuring sustainable development and scalable-evergreen information.

A fully-fledged digital twin to capture, record and disseminate asset information for planning, operation and decision making.

Faced with complex, voluminous data, compatibility issues, and a diverse user base, Sydney Airport needed an open and user-friendly digital platform. Through the implementation of OpenCities, Sydney Airport has started its journey toward the development of their digital twin. Maps@SYD project implements a cloud-based, self-service portal for mass and quick access to all data, to support facilities planning and operations by integrating spatial and survey information, making it accessible to all staff across the organization. This integration provides real-time collaboration and 3D viewing capabilities for planning, auditing, and facilities management.

Having access to an open, digital environment, it increased efficiencies, improved productivity and the quality of deliverables, and reduced costs and resource hours across all departments. Project will reach 95% of SYD people in various departments, such as SYD Digital Twin saves around 1m. AUD by enabling self-service data

Open, Integrated and Interoperable Workflows in Frankfurt Airport Multi-storey parking Deck

This multi-storey car park project merged a data-rich BIM model created from various Bentley applications. This project example shows a new Functionality offered by OpenCities, a new tool that enables users to work on complex iModels and easily split and inspect them. It shows the capabilities available as this BIM information is available at any time during the project and can be used to search, query, and report on every element in the iModel.

Further in the process it could be handed over to construction and assembling on site. Even though it depicts the operating car park, it could help to monitor assets and assist in maintenance.

Min Stad, Gothenburg: Achieving incredible citizen engagement

Engaging stakeholders in city planning allows project teams to gain public feedback, input, and crowdsourcing on urban development projects, fostering better communication, and providing transparency

As the second largest city in Sweden, Gothenburg is quickly expanding and has plans under way to accommodate 150,000 new residents in 80,000 new homes and offices. Gothenburg uses 3D city models to support its internal urban planning tasks and engage the public to participate in urban development. Some projects, such as Västlänken, a tunnel project in central Gothenburg, are seeing thousands of visitors, and a vibrant discussion is enabled online.

“Our portal MinStad and Bentley’s OpenCities Planner has supported the initiative to improve communication with our citizens and to create an active engagement in the development of Gothenburg. Eric Jeansson, Geodata Strategist, City Planning Division, Gothenburg City

Microsoft APAC Campus: Better maintain Infrastructure Assets

Microsoft APAC Singapore Campus combine a wide variety of data into a single 3D model, IoT sensors for Air quality, power & energy efficiancy and occupancy

Bentley has worked with Microsoft to create a digital twin of the new Microsoft APAC headquarters in Singapore, leveraging Bentley digital twin technology on Azure together with information gathered from the physical environment through IoT sensors and end-user experiences, which provides a single view into the wide variety of data that is available

The workplace of the future is about embracing innovation into the very fabric of our space, so that we create multiple touchpoints of connectivity, are intentionally inclusive and accessible, while being very mindful of sustainability and the environment. At Frasers Tower in Singapore, we worked closely with Bentley Systems and Schneider Electric to implement sensors and telemetry to create a connected workplace, that allows us to adjust the space based on usage, therefore improving energy efficiency,” Ricky Kapur, VP for Sales, Marketing and Operations for Microsoft in Asia Pacific.

Sustainable Asset Management of the New South Wales Port Authority

Implementation of a digital twin for a holistic asset view, increase data transparency, eliminate redundancy and promote community engagement and collaboration.

The Port Authority of New South Wales sought to create a dynamic digital representation of their physical assets across six geographically dispersed ports, accessible to multiple departments and stakeholders to improve collaboration, decision-making, and operations. To accommodate the voluminous, multisourced data and ensure they retained accurate, high-fidelity engineering information, they needed to establish a connected utility network and single source of truth. To achieve that, they selected ContextCapture to create accurate 3D reality models of the port sites, and OpenCities applications to establish a GIS and digital twin platform accessible to users for remote asset inspection.

Using Bentley technology streamlined workflows and reduced travel between ports, optimizing collaboration and accurate data sharing among departments and stakeholders, which is expected to save 50% in time compiling data requests. The digital twin solution provides a holistic asset view spanning multiple lifecycles, increasing data transparency, eliminating redundancy, and promoting community engagement and collaboration with environmental and marine agencies.

Nation-Scale Digital Twin of Singapore for advancing city efficiency and sustainability.

Groundbreaking Infrastructure Intelligence in Singapore to improve water, energy, transport and urban planning at the top level.

State-of-the-art digital twin project shows everything is possible when data from different agencies, open source information, and other organizations are federated into an environment and the information can be served both at the macro level and micro level to multiple stakeholders using the data you already have.

Going digital – including through the use of digital twins will help reshape the way our cities are planned, designed, built, and operated. Bentley’s applications and solutions support multiple use cases/workflows for cities, campuses, airports and ports empowering asset owner teams, stakeholders, and the supply chain.

Whether your SDG is focused on infrastructure, innovation, real-estate, energy or water, the experience we’ve gained helping over 50 global cities adopt our software and services, means WE CAN HELP!. Richard Vestner, VP Cities, Bentley Systems.