Digital Twins Showcased During Executive Perspective Sessions

The recent Bentley Systems Year in Infrastructure 2020 Conference (YII) centered largely on digital twins.  The Executive Perspective sessions hosted at the conference provided attendees with a better understanding of the numerous advantages of deploying digital twins for infrastructure and industry.  Bentley Systems’ Greg Demchak, Construction Innovation Laboratory Director; Sanjeev Shah, Business Development Director, Project and Asset Collaboration; and Mehreen Javaid, Digital Integrator, Business Development PlantSight, provided the Executive Perspective showcasing Digital Twins (Twinfrastructure, Twinnovation).  The video of this session can be viewed here.

Defining and Showcasing the Digital Twins

Mr. Demchak defined a digital twin as a “synchronized virtual representation of a real-world asset, a digital version of reality that is continuously updated.”  For example, the Uber app on the mobile is easy to use, provides real time updates, and the interface is simple to learn.  The need to get from A to B never really changed; what changed was the entire transactional experience.  Digital twins have a similar approach, he said. Interacting with digital versions of real infrastructure should be easy, intuitive, and should deliver contextually relevant information when and where users need it.

The true digital evolution lies in how users transact with that information.  Now, with digitalization, the physical environment – real world infrastructure (labor, equipment, sensor data, etc.) is managed throughout its lifecycle.  The digital twin contains the 3D geometry, the design information, the issues, the photos, the point clouds, and the full history of the asset as it changes over time.  It also includes the prototyping phase, construction, operations and maintenance, and any subsequent redesign.  

Speaking about the difference between the digital twin and BIM (building information modelling), Mr. Demchak said that the digital twin is a nondisruptive evolution of BIM-centric workflows.  Digital twins converge the virtual and the physical creating tighter feedback loops, leading to better decision making, improvements in worker productivity, human safety, and asset reliability.

Impact of Digital Twins on City-scale Infrastructure

Taking this further, Sanjeev Shah spoke about High Speed 2 (HS2), Europe’s largest infrastructure project, and showed us their Digital Visualization Hub delivered by Bentley (BC and PCSG).  The HS2 project requires the use of several “specialist applications, which create specialist content stored in specialist systems.”  So, for a user to gain access to the information they need to be proficient in each application as well as procure licenses for each; and that can be expensive, produce duplication errors, create waste, and lead to litigation.  The HS2 Visualization Hub gives users instant access to related information through a geographical user interface – “From scale, through a quick zoom and a single click, users get instant access to a related information from a myriad of sources.”  For more on how HS2 is using digital twins, Mr. Shah referenced an article in BIM+ that features Dr Sonia Zahiroddiny, head of digital engineering at HS2.

In Highways England Smart Motorways digital twin, Mr. Shah showed how a design engineer can very quickly zoom in from a macro level to micro, isolate a component (a traffic monitor camera in this example), select a few relevant parameters, zoom back out and very quickly see all similar assets where they were located.  He also shared information on how the city of Stockholm is using digital twins to combine information about the population, flood data and crime information to provide a better experience for their citizens, and he explained that such data need not be just from sensors.  The example he gave of a project in West London showed data representing physical movements in infrastructure of up to 1 mm, and he went on to explain how this data had been captured from satellites.

Power of the Digital Twins

Technology is making a positive impact on users’ daily lives.  In this context, Mr. Demchak spoke about iTwin Design Review, a web-based capability that gives the flexibility to conduct various types of review workflows - from team-level, work-in-progress collaboration to project-level, multidiscipline coordination, and is now fully integrated with Microsoft Teams.  Users are now using the same technology to bring their designs to life during the construction phase.  Contractors are harnessing the power of SYNCHRO 4D, which is iTwin enabled and can track issues and monitor change, to minimize risk, deliver projects on time, and within budget.

The use of drones, photogrammetry, and mixed reality are converging into a digital twin solution for remote bridge inspections.  For Collins Engineers, this is fundamentally changing their approach to inspections.  Digital twins reduce the time and cost of conducting an inspection while also providing a much safer work environment.  An inspector can review the reality capture of the bridge in full detail from anywhere with the iTwin HoloLens application.

Digital Twins for Industry

The majority of the revenues realized by the extractive and manufacturing industries are derived from brownfield assets that have been in operation for more than 20 years or longer, said Ms. Javaid.  When it comes to digital maturity, many organizations are struggling to bridge the gap between original design and actual plant operations.  EPCs and owners chose PlantSight because they could start the digital transformation journey at any stage of the asset lifecycle.  Building an actionable and sustainable digital twin of a complex industrial system is easy with the help of PlantSight’s cloud-based portal.  One can leverage all the existing engineering data and asset management systems and aggregate them into a digital twin.  

Process and instrumentation drawings (P and ID) require physical retrieval that is time consuming and makes tracking changes difficult and error prone.  To solve this, artificial intelligence and machine learning tools have been developed and patented to quickly extract meaning and understand these analog documents.  By integrating this output with PlantSight and AssetWise, Bentley provides users a solution to efficiently realize the digital twin, empowering their teams to make informed decisions.

In the engineering phase, easily accessible and democratized information is the bedrock of efficient project delivery.  PlantSight has improved design collaboration between the traditionally siloed teams.  All stakeholders have the same view of the digital twin leading to faster and higher quality 3D design.  These models are then being used for handover between engineering and operations, reducing time-to-delivery and improving ROI.