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Bentley System’s Dr Richard Vestner On Urban Adoption, Sustainable Infrastructure & More | |
| Sumita Pawar |
Planning, building, and maintaining a city takes work and dedication.
In light of climate change, the energy crisis, and resource limitations, governments and societies are aware of the necessity of future-proofing cities and infrastructure by addressing sustainability and resilience.
However, they are asking how to start and how to organize and are challenged with the prioritization of urban investments. On the other hand, the infrastructure sector is embracing digitization to improve productivity but is struggling to attract talent and new skills.
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According to the report, digital twins play an important role in helping to make better data-driven decisions along the entire lifecycle of urban infrastructure and to tackle these challenges for the benefit of a liveable urban environment.
Elaborating on the digital twin and smart cities report, an infrastructure A "digital twin is a digital representation of an infrastructure asset, facility, or system that allows you to understand its current state and optimize its future performance.
It provides the structure to virtualize use cases and workflows by using an up-to-date and trusted digital version of the physical infrastructure.
Simulations of different scenarios help identify risks. To be scalable, an open digital twin architecture with excellent integration capabilities is required, which enables users to connect different data types and formats, as well as various systems from different suppliers.
It stated that "smart cities understand how to manage and use data more effectively to support decision-making and digital services in all phases of the lifecycle. They are going digital by embracing technologies like the Internet of Things (IoT), 5G, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and urban digital twins to make decisions based on data and create better experiences and services for the administration, businesses, and citizens.
Smart cities fund and prioritize technology, utilizing data and initiatives to improve and align city investments and operations with targets around sustainability and resilience. These cities typically have dedicated roles like a chief digital or information officer and a digitization unit reporting to the city leadership.
Furthermore, commenting on the sustainable urban infrastructure report, it said that to create a resilient and sustainable urban infrastructure, people in the industry need to have a solid understanding of the urban environment and ecosystem, the ability to perform impact analysis of events, and an operational awareness with defined risk mitigation procedures.
The digital twin supports all three of these areas, combining relevant data sources into a federated view—regardless of data types and formats—and the possibility to apply scenario simulations. Furthermore, the digital twin enables engineers to link real-time sensors for situational awareness of status and trends, supporting operational decisions.
With a digital twin, you can check and optimize the impact of infrastructure on social distancing, urban heat islands, traffic flows, or heavy rainfalls for improving urban resilience, just to mention a few urban use cases.
As the report mentioned, the digital twin also consolidates all components of buildings and infrastructure and can provide an overview of the carbon footprint based on mass balances for a certain material mix and different design alternatives. It is a means to understand and benchmark the environmental impact of a project at an early stage of its development and to support the decarbonization of cities.
As the report on urban adoption stated, there is a remarkable number of early adopters within cities around the world, with changing starting points and foci. They all have an urgent need to aggregate information above the building level, covering bigger facilities in cities or urban districts.
Because of the proliferation of applications and systems for planning and design, asset management, or infrastructure operations, the value comes from consolidating this information and these data sources into a holistic view of the city or campus, making it accessible to as many stakeholders as possible in a digital twin.
For example, Bentley’s technology is currently being used to support the master planning and design of a new district in Berlin called Siemensstadt Square. Over the next 15 years, more than 1 million square meters will be built and operated for production, housing, offices, research and education, retail, parking, and accommodation.
By simulating and reflecting the current and future states, the urban digital twin facilitates collaboration between not only the investor, the city government, contractors, and service providers, but also the public interested in the development of the district. This investment will create an innovation campus that showcases current smart city use cases in Germany’s capital.
Report concluded, technology is here, and there is no reason to wait. Adopters can work in a phased approach based on an order of targeted use cases so that motivation always stays high. There are many ways to create a digital twin of a city; however, it typically starts with connecting, visualizing, and overlaying existing data from various silos.
Users must then learn how to harvest low-hanging fruit from desired use cases and scale usage internally before increasing complexity and granularity by connecting to more data sources and updating them more frequently. Every step of implementation addresses needs and creates value for the organization.