-- Advancing BIM and GIS through 4D Digital Twins

The Year in Infrastructure 2019 Conference -- 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 ( 
https://c212.net/c/link/?t=0&l=en&o=2616230-1&h=3212941583&u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.bentley.com%2Fen%2Fproducts%2Fbrands%2Fplaxis&a=PLAXIS 
), SoilVision ( 
https://c212.net/c/link/?t=0&l=en&o=2616230-1&h=899130424&u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.bentley.com%2Fen%2Fproducts%2Fbrands%2Fsoilvision&a=SoilVision 
), Keynetix ( 
https://c212.net/c/link/?t=0&l=en&o=2616230-1&h=4084998549&u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.keynetix.com%2Fproducts%2Fholebase%2F&a=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 ( 
https://c212.net/c/link/?t=0&l=en&o=2616230-1&h=1730459579&u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.bentley.com%2Fen%2Fproducts%2Fbrands%2Fopenflows&a=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 ( 
https://c212.net/c/link/?t=0&l=en&o=2616230-1&h=3967538343&u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.bentley.com%2Fen%2Fproducts%2Fbrands%2Fopencities-planner&a=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 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 ( 
https://c212.net/c/link/?t=0&l=en&o=2616230-1&h=1272562566&u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.bentley.com%2Fen%2Fproducts%2Fproduct-line%2Freality-modeling-software%2Fcontextcapture-cloud-processing-service&a=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.

Images and Captions
The City of Helsinki leveraged Bentley's reality modeling software to generate 
a 3D representation of Helsinki as part of its smart city initiative, improving 
internal services and processes ( 
https://c212.net/c/link/?t=0&l=en&o=2616230-1&h=555910329&u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.bentley.com%2F-%2Fmedia%2FImages%2FPress%2520Release%2520Images%2F2019%2FHelsinki-fly-over-mesh_model2_1920x1080_lr&a=The+City+of+Helsinki+leveraged+Bentley%27s+reality+modeling+software+to+generate+a+3D+representation+of+Helsinki+as+part+of+its+smart+city+initiative%2C+improving+internal+services+and+processes. 
). Image courtesy of City of Helsinki.

Águas do Porto, EM used Bentley technology to create a digital twin to manage 
water supply, wastewater and stormwater, beaches, and flooding with the goal of 
improving response and resilience ( 
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re%20to%20generate%20a%203D%20representation%20of%20Helsinki%20as%20part%20of%20
its%20smart%20city%20initiative,%20improving%20internal%20services%20and%20proce
sses%20(%20https:/c212.net/c/link/?t=0&l=en&o=2616230-1&h=555910329&u=https%3A%2
F%2Fwww.bentley.com%2F-%2Fmedia%2FImages%2FPress%2520Release%2520Images%2F2019%2
FHelsinki-fly-over-mesh_model2_1920x1080_lr&a=The+City+of+Helsinki+leveraged+Ben
tley%27s+reality+modeling+software+to+generate+a+3D+representation+of+Helsinki+a
s+part+of+its+smart+city+initiative%2C+improving+internal+services+and+processes
.%20). ). Image courtesy of Águas do Porto, EM.

About Bentley Systems' Digital Cities Offerings
Bentley Systems undertakes to advance BIM and GIS through 4D infrastructure 
engineering digital twins for digital cities ( 
https://c212.net/c/link/?t=0&l=en&o=2616230-1&h=1016987053&u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.bentley.com%2Fen%2Fsolutions%2F3d-cities&a=digital+cities 
). Engineers, geospatial professionals, and infrastructure owner-operators 
benefit from applications and digital twin cloud services that advance reality 
modeling (ContextCapture and OrbitGT); water, wastewater, and stormwater system 
planning, design and operations, and flood resilience (OpenFlows); 
engineering-ready geospatial urban planning and visualization (OpenCities Map 
and OpenCities Planner); geotechnical information management (OpenGround); and 
mobility simulation and analytics (LEGION and CUBE).

In both 2018 and 2019, Microsoft named Bentley Systems as Partner of the Year 
in its CityNext category. In 2019, ARC Advisory Group's Engineering Design 
Tools for Plants, Infrastructure, and BIM market study ranked Bentley #1 in 
Water and Wastewater Distribution.

More about Bentley Systems ( 
https://c212.net/c/link/?t=0&l=en&o=2616230-1&h=4179195603&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.bentley.com%2F&a=More+about+Bentley+Systems 
)


Bentley, the Bentley logo, AssetWise, ContextCapture, gINT, iTwin, Keynetix, 
LEGION, MicroStation, OpenBuildings, OpenCities, OpenCities Map, OpenCities 
Planner, OpenFlows, OpenFlows FLOOD, OpenFlows WaterOPS, OpenGround, OpenRail, 
OpenRoads, OpenSite, OpenUtilities, Orbit GT, PLAXIS, ProjectWise, SoilVision, 
STAAD, and SYNCHRO are either registered or unregistered trademarks or service 
marks of Bentley Systems, Incorporated or one of its direct or indirect wholly 
owned subsidiaries. All other brands and product names are trademarks of their 
respective owners.

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SOURCE: Bentley Systems, Incorporated

CONTACT: Press Contact: Jennifer Maguire, +1 610 458 2695, 
jennifer.maguire@bentley.com