{"id":61669,"date":"2019-08-14T11:19:54","date_gmt":"2019-08-14T10:19:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.pbctoday.co.uk\/news\/?p=61669"},"modified":"2022-10-19T14:41:17","modified_gmt":"2022-10-19T13:41:17","slug":"smarter-cities-digital-twins","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.pbctoday.co.uk\/news\/digital-construction-news\/smarter-cities-digital-twins\/61669\/","title":{"rendered":"Building smarter cities with digital twins"},"content":{"rendered":"

PBC Today talks to Robert Mankowski, vice-president of digital cities at Bentley Systems<\/a>, about how digital twins can help to plan, design, build and operate smarter infrastructure<\/h2>\n

Robert Mankowski is vice-president of digital cities, the newest of infrastructure engineering software<\/a>, Bentley Systems\u2019 four business units. It is responsible for helping cities, and the organisations that own and operate the infrastructure in and between cities, to achieve sustainable growth, increase their resilience and increase the safety, health and welfare of their citizens by going digital<\/a>.<\/p>\n

PBC Today sat down with him to discuss the rise of digital twins and how they can contribute to building smarter cities.<\/p>\n

How do digital twins bring together data from different sources and, more importantly, integrate that data to help shape city services?<\/h3>\n

Cities typically have infrastructure information spread throughout their organisations. Different departments have different systems for managing the data associated with their specific workflows and infrastructure assets, and some city infrastructure is owned and operated by private parties.<\/p>\n

The data exists in a variety of formats \u2013 CAD, BIM and GIS, engineering models, spreadsheets, databases, documents, real-time and historic IoT data<\/a> streams, photos and point clouds, to name just a few broad categories.<\/p>\n

The data changes all the time, and one of the biggest problems owner-operators face is getting the right, up-to-date information to make informed decisions. It\u2019s been difficult and time-consuming to get the data when it\u2019s needed. It has also been difficult to integrate it across these departments and organisations to form a holistic view of the city\u2019s infrastructure assets and systems.<\/p>\n

With Bentley iTwin\u00ae Services, an open-source framework for creating infrastructure digital twins, cities can federate data \u2013 whatever the engineering applications and BIM tools, repositories and file systems, or file formats and schemas might be.<\/p>\n

This federated approach includes engineering data, CAD, BIM, GIS and reality data, CityGML, open data formats, other legacy data and operations data into an actionable digital twin of the city. Additionally, this can include real-world conditions \u2013 IoT-connected devices\/sensors. Then, the city can manage and collaborate city infrastructure information in every stage of the asset lifecycle from planning to performance.<\/p>\n

With this federated information, cities can manage the data associated with and generated by the infrastructure assets.<\/p>\n

This open, connected data environment (CDE) supports ongoing operations and maintenance, and:<\/p>\n