Better decisions for complex infrastructure
Bob Mankowski, Senior Vice President, Engineering Applications and Benoit Fredericque, Senior Director, iTwin Product Management, Bentley Systems talk to Darrell Smart
INFRASTRUCTURE owners are increasingly challenged to deal with aging assets and the critical demand to monitor, modernise and improve those assets. Being able to capture, manage, analyse and share a vast amount of real-time data helps assist that challenge.
Visionary users are utilising innovative surveying and monitoring technologies to capture the current and changing condition of infrastructure using reality modelling, mobile mapping, instrumentation and sensor data management to enable better decision-making throughout the asset lifecycle.
Civil Engineering Surveyor spoke to Bentley Systems’ Bob Mankowski, senior vice president, engineering applications, and Benoit Fredericque, senior director, iTwin product management at the Year in Infrastructure event in Singapore to find out how technology is changing the way we plan, construct and manage complex infrastructure.
What are you most excited about this year?
BM: The Year In Infrastructure and Going Digital Awards Conference is my favourite time of year because I get to see how the best projects in the world are leveraging the work that we’ve been doing. This year is no exception with the iTwin technology being used to create multifaceted digital twins. Bringing together the different types of data that are captured such as lidar, photogrammetry, but also combining that with the IoT, engineering BIM models and more is what I’m excited about – it’s really happening – and people are driving really good outcomes from that.
BF: Seeing the iTwin technology and iTwin portfolio being so widely adopted and creating intelligent users, that’s exciting from my standpoint. We’re also seeing reality modelling being used almost everywhere. That’s a great sign of the industry maturing and advancing which is terrific.
What’s impressed you the most about the finalist presentations in surveying and monitoring?
BF: The digital twin of St. Peter’s Basilica in Vatican City by Italferr is a fantastic project. The level of detail captured is amazing. It’s fascinating to see the technologies and techniques used on that project such as laser scanning, sensors; drones, ground penetrating radar, even helium balloons. Combining all that data together with the IoT, that was impressive.
It’s fascinating to see the technologies and techniques used on that project such as laser scanning, sensors; drones, ground penetrating radar, even helium balloonsBM: To follow on to that, they also derived structural analysis models. An important point about infrastructure digital twins, is that they can be used to create different types of models, in this case, a numerical analysis model for finite element method analysis for structural health monitoring. What also impressed me about the finalists presentations is the diversity of the projects. As well as St. Peter’s Basilica, there’s the 3D city model and city GML in Hong Kong.
That’s really impressive for its scale and its breadth and the use of industry standards. There’s also the DBOX drone, a highly innovative automated system for continuous surveying. That combines hardware and software together to produce essentially, a survey as a service approach. That’s what really struck me about the three finalists is that they’re all very different.
What developments do you think civil engineering surveyors look forward to in the future?
BF: We’re now seeing artificial intelligence (AI) being used on many fronts. AI will address getting more information out of the data. The trends in AI going beyond the model is one area where we’re seeing progress. AI will improve on the core of surveying by bringing even more quality to the model we generate. We are just at the beginning with AI, it’s intriguing but we have long way go.
The trends in AI going beyond the model is one area where we’re seeing progress. AI will improve on the core of surveying by bringing even more quality to the model we generate.BM: One of the things that I’m sure your membership thinks about is the fidelity and frequency of data capture and the different use cases and what those use cases demand. It was interesting to hear from Dr Victor Koo, Singapore Land Authority, today talk about its objectives around safety, intelligent infrastructure and sustainability and what kind of data quality and frequency that is needed in order to support the decisions making in those different types of use cases.
We will continue to see higher fidelity at higher frequency become possible. The DBOX is a step in that direction. I expect processes to continue to become more and more automated, with higher fidelity devices getting smaller and cheaper, more powerful and more accessible.
How has going digital improved structural inspection monitoring?
BM: Structures in general, whether we’re talking about dams, bridges, telecommunications towers or transmission lines for electric distribution are all very difficult structures to inspect. Today, many of them are inspected manually. They require personnel to go out and climb or to otherwise put themselves in harm’s way in order to capture this information. It takes days to carry out, even then, they are unable to capture the full information.
By going digital, we’re really seeing the fidelity and the frequency of the inspections increasing simultaneously. But more importantly, improving the safety of the inspection process. That’s the single biggest difference between now and the way it was done before. By going digital, you don’t need to put humans in danger in order to capture a large portion of the data.
What impact will AI have on interoperability and open standards?
BF: AI and the pace of frequency of data collection will contribute to an increase of information to exchange to available data. It is fundamental at the essence of the code that we must provide good interoperability for exchanging that data. The fact that the data is open is the essence of all that. The value is getting the information together to build the right analysis on top of the data. And we must have open standards. The challenge is to get all the industries standards together. That’s one of the great contributors of not focusing one single data layer, but getting all the layers together.
For a few years everyone was talking about how the construction industry was so digitally immature, but that’s changed dramatically.BM: In terms of the standards, I’m sure your members are concerned with global and relative accuracy and precision and there’s an increasing awareness of that. One of the concerns I had heard from surveyors early on in our journey with automated photogrammetry was we didn’t understand the accuracy and we didn’t understand surveying, and I think it was true.
Many people are out there taking pictures or flying drones without proper control. As we are aware, depending on the use case, that’s very, very important. So in terms of quality standards, the profession has to continue to police that.
BF: It goes back to traceability and trust. It’s about knowing the accuracy of the data you are capturing and using. It’s not only the standard around exchanging the data, but also the meta data that comes with it. It’s about understanding where and when the date was acquired, by who and how it was rectified. That’s very important.
What area of infrastructure is leading the digital twin/reality modelling race?
BF: There’s definitely been an increase in digital twins and reality modelling on large complex infrastructure such as bridges, dams and telecommunications towers. However, a good operational model for those types of assets requires great level of experience.
BM: The acquisition expertise is pretty high for some assets. I’m not sure who’s leading the race here, but one area that I do see a lot of adoption is construction. For a few years everyone was talking about how the construction industry was so digitally immature, but that’s changed dramatically. Construction is definitely progressing.
BF: Concepts like the DBOX are very well aligned with this. Construction sites that vary with very high frequency operations, are in demand for high frequency updates and collections. That acquisition of high frequency collections also contributes to the next step of documenting all the assets which is then used for the operational side.
This year’s YII theme is infrastructure intelligence, what does that mean to you?
BM: When I think about infrastructure intelligence, I think about the two sides of a coin. Delivering better infrastructure, better; how we manage our infrastructure projects and how we are using various strategies to improve the way we design and construct infrastructure. And then, having intelligent infrastructure that improves the way infrastructure performs during its operating lifecycles. By leveraging various technologies like generative AI, digital components, automated drawing production in the project delivery process, improves the way we deliver infrastructure. On the operation side, having more intelligent infrastructure by utilising the digital twin – the information technology (IT), the operational technology (OT) and the engineering technology (ET) – together with artificial intelligence improves the performance.
A great example, is the Tuas water reclamation plant (TWRP) project being built by PUB, Singapore’s National Water Agency, where sensor information models and numerical-based analysis models are being integrated with machine learning models to get early identifications and locations of leakages. For me, that’s a really good example of intelligent infrastructure in operation.
One of the groups I worked with at Bentley was geotechnical information management – before we acquired our Seequent subsidiary – where they would differentiate between data and information. Data is the raw items that you collect and store in a database. You transform that by understanding it and turning it into actionable intelligence, and that’s information. You need intelligent information to drive this type of intelligent infrastructure and agenda. Ultimately, that’s the purpose of it all, better decisions.
Bob Mankowski, senior vice president, engineering applications and Benoit Fredericque, senior director, iTwin product management, Bentley Systems were taking to Darrell Smart