Raymond Tribdino
Editor
BENTLEY Systems and Topcon have announced a marriage not just of their technologies, but also of their companies.
Digital Construction Works was established with financial and human capital commitments from both companies, with the joint venture focused on the advancement of constructioneering to deliver better design-build outcomes.
“We are now open for business,” Digital Construction Works chief executive officer Ted Lamboo declared after Greg Bentley, CEO of Bentley Systems introduced him to the gathering of 133 media men from 52 countries at the annual Year in Infrastructure 2019 (YII2019)—Bentley System’s annual construction technology conference and awards presentation.
Lamboo is formerly senior vice president of strategic partnerships at Bentley systems.
Joining him at Digital Construction Works is chief operating officer Jason Hallet, previously vice president for global software business development and later digital construction and business development at Topcon. Hallet brings with him 12 years of experience in surveying technology and his deep management insights in construction.
“This partnership with Topcon, evolved thru the years of working together. Five years ago, we brought together our expertise, today we are formally setting out on a new venture together,” Lamboo commented while further explaining how the financial and brainpower commitments from both companies will work to amplify each other’s strengths. The aim it to realize constructioneering’s potential is to close a gap in the world’s infrastructure development.
CLOSING THE INFRASTRUCTURE GAP
This gap needs to be closed rapidly, according to Ray O’ Connor, president and CEO of Topcon.
“There has been no significant improvement in productivity in the construction industry since the 1950s,” O’Connor said citing a McKenzie report on the industry. He explained that this lack of productivity improvement meant that the industry persisted on using traditional protocols or systems, including the inability in the industry to monitor how close the actual construction is from well-thought of design.
Digital Construction Works aims to break this conditionc, by embedding “its experts within constructors major project teams to advance and optimize constructioneering processes.”
What Topcon and Bentley Systems initiated was done in the spirit of changing mindsets and processes on how we approach construction, and that collaboration has led to the development of this joint venture,” O’ Connor explained. He also said that the new company aligns perfectly with the aim of helping the industry succeed in meeting infrastructure demands through technological innovations.
TECHNOLOGY CLOSES THE DIVIDE
“Bentley and Topcon have been working both on its own, and with each other in the advancement of BIM and constructioneering . In the process we learned from each other, and Digital Construction Works is the outcome of this learning and collaboration,” Lamboo said.
“Through the new organization companies will have the opportunity to integrate hardware and software capabilities to more quickly and efficiently adopt new technologies for more rapid productivity improvements…we are excited to take this journey with Bentley Systems in moving the industry forward,” O’ Connor added.
For his part, Greg Bentley said that Digital Construction Works affirms the commitment of both company’s by bringing in its best resources—technology and mind power—and deliver this to the construction industry, to benefit projects of all scales.
“We and Topcon have now in turn, committed many of our best resources, professionals experienced in both construction and software, to serve shoulder-to-shoulder, in virtual hardhats, to innovatively advance the required digital integration,” Bentley confirmed.
THE COURTING PERIOD
In 2014, the two companies met and first worked together.
It was not until two years later did they join forces to co-develop enhanced integration between the Bentley’s Magnet and Topcon’s ProjectWise Cloud services. The integration resulted in engineering and construction workflows that was hailed by the industry as ground breaking because it resulted in significant procedural, cost or design improvements in construction project quality and performance.
In 2017, they launched Constructioneering Academies, announced at the 2017 YII conference, and opening up a new resource base, including Topcon’s own sandbox facilities globally which introduced construction professionals to experience first-hand, new digital practices.
The following year, the companies assimilated Bentley’s Synchro and Topcon’s ClearEdge3D acquisitions into their constructioneering portfolio.
Just recently, the two companies released further technology updates including 4D surveying, reality modeling, scheduling and logistics, work packaging, machine control and progressive assurance for construction.
Mandated to embed its experts within constructors’ major project teams, DCW, through its integration services, connect and automate existing processes, helping to institutionalize these digital workflows with the intention of conserving resources, saving costs, ensuring environmental compliance and shortening to the most efficient time possible the execution of a project, no matter what the scale is.
From left to right Greg Bentley, CEO, Bentley Systems; introduces Digital Construction Works CEO Ted Lamboo. At the announcement of the joint venture is Jason Hallet, COO (beside Ted) and Ray O' Connor, President and CEO of Topcon Positioning Systems.
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Why BIM and GIS are effectively advanced through 4D digital twins.
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SINGAPORE – The Year in Infrastructure 2019 Conference – 23 October 2019 – Bentley Systems, Incorporated, the leading global provider of comprehensive software and digital twin cloud services for advancing the design, construction, and operations of infrastructure, today 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 to 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.
Greg Bentley, CEO of Bentley Systems said, “Bentley Systems’ major technical thrust is the advancement of digital twins across infrastructure domains. This finally opens up for owners their previously “dark” engineering technologies and data (ET), for federation with traditional information technology (IT) and newly connected operating technologies (OT). Correspondingly, because the opportunities for benefits are so compelling, our major organizational initiative is our new digital cities product advancement group. Our digital cities group’s charter is both to ramp infrastructure engineering digital twins to full city scale, and at the same time to help with going digital through entry points for any engineering department in any municipality.”
“At Bentley Systems we have long and rich histories in respectively geospatial technology (GIS), and in BIM, for municipal infrastructure applications spanning capex and opex,” said Robert Mankowski, vice president, digital cities. “Today, I believe we are the leading innovator in reality modeling and in geotechnical modeling and data management. With our new cloud-based iTwin Services bringing this all together, city and campus digital twins now offer an immediate opportunity to help cities and regions solve a wide range of challenges and problems, enhancing their infrastructure performance and their constituents’ quality of life.”
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 (OpenBuildings, OpenSite, OpenRoads, OpenRail, OpenUtilities) can leverage this digital context to model new and improved buildings, roads, transit systems, tunnels, bridges, utilities, and more.
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.
Public works departments, 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. And, 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 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).
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 today announced OpenGround, a new cloud service (available end of 2019) to store, manage, report, and share data about natural ground conditions.
Water Network Digital Twins
Building upon its deep 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 optimized performance and business intelligence, converging IT (GIS) with OT (telemetry, SCADA instrumentation, sensors) and ET (hydraulic simulation). WaterOPS provides real-time operational decision support extending Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (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 web, mobile, touchscreens, and digital billboards, to intuitively visualize and explore 2D, 3D, GIS and other data aligned with the reality modeling of the city.
Digital Co-ventures for Digital Cities
(With Topcon) Cloud-based photogrammetry processing powered by Bentley’s ContextCapture is incorporated in Topcon MAGNET Collage Web, a web-based service for publication, sharing, and analysis of reality capture data. The intrinsic Bentley ContextCapture Cloud Processing Service enables operators to upload UAV imagery direct-to-web without the need for high-end hardware requirements or IT constraints.
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Advancing mobility digital twins through Orbit GT’s automated mobile mapping workflows (digital context) and Citilabs’ CUBEsimulations (digital components) for predictive transportation scenarios (digital chronology)
SINGAPORE – The Year in Infrastructure 2019 Conference – 21 October 2019 – Bentley Systems, Incorporated, the leading global provider of comprehensive software and digital twin cloud services for advancing the design, construction, and operations of infrastructure, today announced the acquisitions of global mobility simulation (CUBE) and analytics (Streetlytics) software provider Citilabs, and global provider of 3D and mobile mapping software, Orbit Geospatial Technologies (Orbit GT).
The newly acquired technologies, in conjunction with Bentley’s existing design integration and digital cities offerings, enable engineering-based mobility digital twins. Road mobility digital twins converge cities’ digital context (including 4D surveying facilitated by Orbit GT for drone-and vehicle-mounted mobile mapping), and digital components (including from Bentley’s OpenRoads engineering applications) with CUBE simulations—to model and assure real-world throughput capacity for proposed and existing roadway assets. Streetlytics traffic data will become increasingly available through Bentley’s cloud services to calibrate and validate mobility digital twins.
Robert Mankowski, vice president, digital cities, for Bentley Systems, said, “Mobility is a priority opportunity for city digital twins, because too often existing planning and simulation efforts are disconnected from the infrastructure’s engineering reality. As the roadway design software leaders, we’re very enthusiastic to be the first to enable engineering-founded mobility digital twins. With these acquisitions, we can now bring together traffic simulations, by way of the respected and versatile CUBE software—led by traffic engineer Michael Clarke to have now become a market leader—with automated mobile mapping workflows for reality modeling of roadways, as envisioned and realized by Peter Bonne, and his family, in leading the team behind Orbit GT. This will serve communities and regions in designing, testing, and optimizing the resilience of their mobility infrastructure.”
Citilab’s CUBE simulation software provides world-leading predictive transportation technology, helping engineers and planners to design and optimize safe, efficient, effective, and environmentally sustainable mobility systems. Citilab’s Streetlyticsprovides mobility data and analytics on the moving population within the U.S. and Canada for planners, engineers, and infrastructure asset managers to make data-informed decisions about transportation trends.
Michael Clarke, president and CEO for Citilabs, said, “We are excited to become a part of Bentley Systems. Our customers and partners will have a fantastic opportunity to fully integrate the planning, design, and operation of multi-modal transportation systems. At Citilabs, our mission has been to enable our customers to leverage location-based data, behavioral models, and machine learning through our products to understand and forecast movement in our cities, regions and nations. Today’s announcement will truly bring together a rich understanding of current and projected travel to improve the design and operation of tomorrow’s mobility systems.”
About Orbit Geospatial Technologies
Orbit GT’s offerings help users efficiently manage, process, and share very large amounts of imagery, point cloud, and 3D (mobile, oblique, terrestrial, UAS, indoor) mapping data for use with reality modeling and digital twins. Orbit GT’s technology adds to Bentley’s existing digital cities, reality modeling, and point cloud processing offerings including ContextCaptureand Pointools.
Peter Bonne, CEO of Orbit GT, said, “Today’s announcement offers our team, partners, and customers a unique opportunity to take a big leap forward in addressing today’s need for increasingly accurate, versatile, manageable, and embedded use of digital twins. Advancing the 3D mapping paradigm has always been at the heart of Orbit GT’s activities. In adding to Bentley’s digital cities offerings, we will jointly broaden the solutions portfolio and provide unprecedented possibilities for collaboration among platforms. I am excited to help build this future together with great teams at Bentley Systems. In effect, we are now advancing 3D mapping to underlie 4D digital twins!”
Citilab’s CUBE simulation software provides predictive transportation technology, helping engineers and planners to design and optimize safe, efficient, effective, and environmentally sustainable mobility systems.
Registration now open for annual infrastructure conference and awards;
Dr. Ayesha Khanna and Keith Clarke announced as keynote speakers.
SINGAPORE – 7 August 2019 – Bentley Systems, Incorporated, the leading global provider of comprehensive software solutions and digital twin cloud services for advancing the design, construction, and operations of infrastructure will host its Year in Infrastructure 2019 Conference and awards ceremony at one of the most iconic buildings in Asia, the Marina Bay Sands Expo and Convention Centre in Singapore. Advancing BIM through Digital Twins is the theme of this year’s conference, which takes place October 21 through 24.
The Year in Infrastructure Conference is an annual global gathering of leading executives of infrastructure design, construction, and operations focused on best practices and technologies for going digital.
This year’s conference features nearly 100 speakers and more than 150 informative sessions including keynotes by leading industry experts, user success stories, interactive workshops, panel discussions, and technology demonstrations.
Dr. Ayesha Khanna, co-founder and CEO of ADDO AI, an artificial intelligence (AI) advisory firm headquartered in Singapore, is one of the guest keynote speakers for this year’s conference. Dr. Khanna has been a strategic advisor on artificial intelligence, smart cities, and fintech to clients including SMRT, SOMPO, and Smart Dubai.
She was also named one of South East Asia’s groundbreaking female entrepreneurs by Forbes magazine in 2018.
Keith Clarke, chairman of the board for UK-based Forum for the Future, is the other featured guest keynote speaker.
Clarke is a chartered architect with more than 40 years of experience in construction and engineering and was formerly the chief executive of the global engineering and design consultancy firm, Atkins. He is a non-executive director for Sirius Minerals plc, chair of Future Cities Catapult and Tidal Lagoon Power plc, vice president of the Institute of Civil Engineers, patron of the Environmental Industries Commission at Oxford, and has honorary fellowships from the Royal Academy of Engineering, the Institution of Structural Engineers, and Cardiff University. He is also visiting professor for sustainable design at Aston University.
Attendees will hear from other industry thought leaders and learn about technologies and best practices that are shaping the future of infrastructure delivery and operations. Speakers from Bentley’s strategic partner organizations, including Microsoft, Siemens, and Topcon will participate in technology demonstrations, presentations, and discussions on numerous topics.
New to this year’s conference are ACCELERATE sessions led by Bentley’s application experts. Featuring more than 20 topics, the sessions give infrastructure experts exclusive insights into how their organizations can master the latest enhancements and key capabilities of Bentley applications to help drive efficiency through multidiscipline workflows.
Attendees can learn best practices through Academies Day sessions led by industry experts. Academies Day features six sessions: digital advancement, construction, constructioneering, research, reality modeling, and process industries. The academies team will also conduct live, interactive sessions in the Technology Pavilion throughout the conference.
In addition, the 2019 finalists in Bentley’s Year in Infrastructure Awards program will present their projects during industry-focused forums — Buildings and Campuses, Digital Cities, Industrial Infrastructure, Rail and Transit, Roads and Bridges, and Energy and Water Utilities. Winners will be announced at a gala and awards program at the conclusion of the conference.
“We’re pleased to be hosting our Year in Infrastructure conference and awards gala in Singapore again this year. Singapore is a leader in innovative use of technology for the delivery and operations of infrastructure and was named a Smart City in 2018, so it is a fitting and inspirational location to host an event that explores the innovations and best practices of technology use for outstanding infrastructure projects around the world. And we’re proud to note that the extraordinary Marina Bay Sands structural system was designed by Arup using Bentley software and is a spectacular example of excellence in structural design and engineering," Chris Barron, chief communications officer for Bentley Systems said.
The Year in Infrastructure Conference is an annual global gathering of leading executives of infrastructure design, construction, and operations focused on best practices and technologies for going digital.
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