Page 77 - BENTLEY SYSTEMS PR REPORT - NOVEMBER 2023

access your plans, your data, all in one place. It has an open, federated environment to ensure
the right people have the right information at the right time to manage projects and share
assets and project information according to their functions/need. You have the most current
and updated information at your disposal. Collaboration is a major focus for us where we help
our users save time, save money, increase safety, reliability and reduce risks. Many of the
project challenges can be solved when you have access to the information you need and
collaborate between teams. So, the use of technology to provide intelligent infrastructure, and
collaboration, helps our users achieve their goals and positive outcomes.
What other constraints can you think of when it comes to setting up the design for
complicated projects?
Regardless of you working on a road or a bridge or any kind of transportation project, you’re
again, working with constraints. The winner of the Roads category, the I-70 Floyd Hill To
Veterans Memorial Tunnels is a great project in Colorado in the United States
where ATKINSRÉALIS working with Colorado DOT needed to provide roadway improvements
along an eight-mile section of the corridor. Now, this is an area with severe congestion and
traffic bottlenecks, not only for people who live there, but also for visitors to their world class ski
resorts. So, it’s very busy at certain times. There was an original road and bridge through there
that was laid very low next to the river, next to parklands where people hike and fish etc. which
needed to be rebuilt and elevated. There were many site-specific challenges and constraints
such as minimizing impact to adjacent environmentally sensitive areas, reducing impacts to
floodways, reducing rock excavation, and phasing the construction works to reduce impact to
existing roadways and adjacent environmentally sensitive areas. Using digital twins and
working in a connected digital environment saved them USD 1.2 million in coordination time,
and 97% of effort developing and publishing digital twins for review. This allowed them to
quickly update the models to mitigate environmental and social impact. And this happens to a
lot of our users that they have to work in an environment where it’s not all greenfield. They have
to figure out how to best work with the environment. One of the ways we help is in the design
process to run different scenarios, different simulations, to look at the different options for their
design.
And this is what you would have heard in the keynote too, we were talking about generative
design learning and relearning from things they’ve done before. And that absolutely helps.
We’ve seen numerous examples where this approach has enabled users to learn from the
technology and make decisions that save time and money through faster designs and improved
quality of design and construction.
And if I can add on to that, another thing we are seeing with AI, is the Robert Street project
which is a great example of using AI and digital twins to augment traditional inspection
methods. This is a historic bridge that they needed to be able to inspect very thoroughly without
shutting it down entirely on a regular basis. Using drones, Collins Engineers working with
Minnesota DOT captured over 29,000 images and generated a high-fidelity 3D digital twin of the
bridge that was then uploaded to the cloud. Bridge inspectors in the office and in the field could
then access the digital twins via computers or tablets and record their inspection information
directly on the models. Now, as compared to manually doing this inspection, inspectors are
physically spending a lot less time in the field with this method. Less disruption, reducing safety
risk to the public and to the employees and you are not shutting down the bridge as often as
well. So that’s another challenge that Bentley is solving with the help of AI and digital twins for
its users.
Since we are talking about AI, what other ways are users leveraging data within digital twins,
including AI and ML?

https://techitupme.com/bentley-systems-simplifying-complex-infrastructure-building-with-digital-twins/