From LONDON – Software solutions provider Bentley Systems announced several new services and strategic acquisitions during today’s inaugural press conference at the Bentley Year in Infrastructure Conference 2018 in London.
LEVERAGING DIGITAL TWINS
This morning, CEO Greg Bentley inaugurated iTwin™ services, a new set of digital twin cloud services for infrastructure projects and assets. This solution offers the ability to leverage digital twins by including, for example, analytics, artificial intelligence and machine learning in simulations, throughout the lifecycle of design and construction. iTwin™ allows for the capturing of the physical conditions of any infrastructure asset in order to realize its digital representation, while keeping the digital components up-to-date in order to have a reliable synchronization in case of any changes in the real world. For Ted Lamboo, senior VP of Bentley Systems,
The process of maintaining twins and recognizing that it is not a static process and a one-time delivery process, I believe this is big news.
iTwin™ services will be available in early 2019.
OPEN-SOURCE LIBRARY
The ideal of the digital twin is that it has the intelligence of what has changed over time. Every piece of infrastructure is evolving continuously. Having a tracked record of what changed in the infrastructure is the best way to avoid failures or weaknesses. You need to constantly survey to capture the change and that change becomes the base record for doing any future work (maintenance, modification, refurbishment). Change management in the construction world is quite uncommon.
THE LEGION ACQUISITION
The acquisition of LEGION, the leading pedestrian simulation software, was also announced during the press conference. Pedestrian flows are indeed fundamental design criteria for infrastructure projects such as airports or train stations. Coupled with AI and machine learning, LEGION simulation tools can thus predict how people are going to walk in such facilities. With this acquisition, Bentley augments its design modeling offer, providing designers and engineers with improved pedestrian simulations.
THE Agency9 ACQUISITION
Bentley wants every city to go digital. With the acquisition of the Swedish Agency9, which provided Sweden’s municipalities with city-scale digital twin cloud services, Bentley is offering each city the opportunity to create its digital twin. This collaboration should result in improving urban planning as well as the cities’ asset performance.