Advancing BIM and GIS through 4D Digital Twins
Bentley Systems helps city stakeholders create digital twins at city-scale helping stakeholders gain insights with access to trusted information whenever and wherever it is needed. Bentley provides solutions for reality modeling, 3D mapping, engineering analysis, operational analytics, and immersive web visualization. This comprehensive set of solutions helps cities to create digital twins of city information to manage the data associated with and generated by their infrastructure assets.
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Digital Twins are enabled by federating data, an open and connected data environment
4D digital twins become a common and federating index for previously siloed information, without requiring source systems to change their existing environments or data formats. The foundation context for any digital twin includes reality meshes, terrain models, imagery, and GIS sources. Engineering models (from any BIM software) 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.
Bentley’s core competency is in engineering technologies (ET) – but the company is converging ET with operations technologies (OT) and information technologies (IT) to deliver digital twins. Made possible by the convergence of 3D/4D visualization, reality modeling, mixed reality, and geotechnical engineering, digital twins enable an immersive and holistic view of infrastructure assets above and below ground.
Driving multi-discipline collaboration
Collaboration and information sharing across city departments and with external stakeholders. Property developers, utilities, transportation agencies, and others now 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 lifecycles. Users of Bentley’s open applications (OpenFlows, OpenBuildings, OpenSite, OpenRoads, OpenRail, OpenUtilities) can leverage this digital context to model new and improved buildings, roads, transit systems, tunnels, bridges, utilities, and more.
Improving asset performance (reliability and resilience)
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.
With a city-scale digital twin, city stakeholders gain new insights through simulating real-world situations, optimizing systems and processes, and monitoring the performance and condition of assets. Applications like OpenCities Map, OpenCities Planner, and OpenFlows applications, including OpenFlows FLOOD, provide comprehensive environments supporting digital twin workflows, including ongoing management and operations of the city infrastructure, planning, and flood resilience. Additionally, OpenCities Planner provides an environment for collaboration with stakeholders and residents.
Digital Twins support important city use-cases
Once a city has a digital twin at city scale, many use-cases will be possible. For instance, the city of Helsinki, Finland uses their Helsinki 3D+ model to support many use cases including wind, solar, energy, and noise analysis, as well as urban planning at city-scale. And Lisbon, Portugal examines the flood resilience of their city.
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Urban Planning and Project Visualization
Cities want to improve urban planning with greater levels of detail and optimize the performance of existing assets. Cloud technology enables faster development, higher productivity, reduced costs, and more secure environments for cities. Bentley, working closely with strategic partner Microsoft, delivers solutions on Azure, tapping the power of the cloud to realize the potential of real-time business insights and collaboration for greater efficiency.
- Easily share and communicate urban planning and development projects to stakeholders.
- 3D rendering engine that can stream large-scale digital twins online
- Ability to visualize projects spanning entire cities down to the street level using a combination of terrain models, reality meshes, and even semantic 3D city models
Modeling, Analysis and Simulation [urban flood resilience]
Extreme hydrometeorological events with rapid urbanization and inadequate draining substructures trigger flooding and cause major damage to infrastructure, impact human safety, and weaken the economy. Flood resilience refers to how to comprehensively manage flood risks to minimize impacts and rapidly recover from disruptions cause by the flood event.
Bentley’s flood resilience solution for urban, riverine, and coastal systems bring accurate and reliable risk and analysis data to agencies involved in flood preparedness, response, recovery, and mitigation. With the use of digital twins, cities get advanced and integrated flood modeling and simulation that enables the understanding and mitigation of flood risks of the complex array of interconnected processes related to urban, riverine, and coastal systems.
Resilience teams can make the right decisions using actionable insights to anticipate early warning and promote response to increase public safety and decrease damage to infrastructure, while minimizing service interruption, avoiding additional mitigation cost, and improving response times.
- Modeling and simulation of flooding events with the use of digital twins.
- Advanced and integrated flood modeling and simulation that enable the understanding and mitigation of flood risks of the complex array of interconnected processes related to urban, riverine, and coastal systems.
- Enhanced engagement with citizens by gathering information from the public via tools like crowdsourcing to support planning, and to get information during weather events or disasters
Stakeholder and Resident Engagement
Engage stakeholders and citizens to improve communication and feedback from master planning to project realization, allowing for decentralized collaboration
Improve communication and collaboration across departments, city ecosystems, residents, providing greater transparency and improved engagement. Deliver digital experiences (mixed reality and wearables) or visualization and crowdsourcing through devices like web, mobile, touchscreens, and digital billboards.