Bentley Focuses on 3D GIS for Sustainable Infrastructure

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By Matt Ball | 16 May 2011 | 4843

Bentley Systems has been marketing its products around the idea of sustaining infrastructure for many years. This approach has expanded toward the packaging of a 3D cities approach, and the notion of intelligent infrastructure. V1 editor Matt Ball spoke recently with Ton de Vries, government solution executive at Bentley Systems, about the company’s market position, its new Bentley Map product packaging, and the uptake in 3D for smarter city management.

Bentley Systems has been marketing its products around the idea of sustaining infrastructure for many years. This approach has expanded toward the packaging of a 3D cities approach, and the notion of intelligent infrastructure. V1 editor Matt Ball spoke recently with Ton de Vries, government solution executive at Bentley Systems, about the company’s market position, its new Bentley Map product packaging, and the uptake in 3D for smarter city management.

V1: You’ve been involved in Bentley’s focus on 3D cities for more than a year now; with a global outreach that has included webcasts, and other education offerings.

De Vries: We have conducted a series of activities, including the marketing campaign, and our Be Inspired event in Amsterdam last October, which included a roundtable discussion on 3D city modeling. We’ve had a great response to the webcasts we did in France, Germany, China, and the Netherlands. Overall, we’ve had more than 2,500 registered attendees to this online content. Recordings are still available for playback at www.bentley.com.

We started by promoting our 3D City GIS offering, and I think this is the right way to approach it, but we’re expanding it to 3D intelligent modeling. The concept originated in GIS departments, where they started building 3D models and using them for a variety of visualization and planning activities. Now, the models have entered into the engineering and construction disciplines, where they provide the ability to see what is going to be built, ensure that it remains as designed, and keep the public informed on the progress of projects.

The focus is on 3D GIS for 3D intelligent modeling. The GIS part is often focused on visualization. For example, when one talks about intelligent modeling, the focus is on integrating BIM models into the city model, with attribution and objects instead of pretty pictures.

V1: Just last week, you released a whole new series of Bentley Map products. Do these include new features to address this new paradigm of 3D intelligent modeling?

De Vries: One of the things that we’re doing is to include a CityGML-compliant data schema within Bentley Map. It’s a schema that is 100 percent CityGML compliant, which means that you have a schema and all the attributions that are defined in the OGC standard. It allows you to start working out of the box with the Bentley Map CityGML schema. We are one of the first vendors to provide such a schema with our application, and we see that cities are interested in starting their 3D modeling efforts using the OGC CityGML standard from day one.

Currently these standards are used more in Europe and the Middle East, but I expect the U.S. market to pick up soon. I think we’re on the edge of a breakthrough for 3D city models around the world, including the U.S., and open standards like CityGML play an important role.

V1: One nice thing within the Bentley product line is that it ties seamlessly into engineering and construction. There seems to be a growing interest to highly manage projects and to tie that into the model for context.

De Vries: If you’re going to make the move from a 2D GIS to a 3D intelligent city model, you’re going to invest a lot in the model. Creating the model has become much more cost-effective compared to two or three years ago. LiDAR survey and photogrammetry technologies can now easily be used to create the 3D model and, equally important, to maintain the model and keep it up to date. But the bottom line is that a 3D city model can and should be used beyond visualization.

It should be leveraged throughout the entire lifecycle and workflow for city infrastructure for flood analysis, sun and shadow analysis, line of sight analysis, and also for engineering processes. It should be incorporated into the utility data, to get an early understanding of what’s going on underground.

We have some case study examples in the Crossrail project in London, a $24.5 billion investment in a new underground railway linking the east to the west of the city. If you look at the underground situation near a station in 2D, it is a mess. It is so busy. The same information in a 3D model shows the connections and what is what, and where objects are really positioned. It’s a great example of the value of 3D in the engineering and construction process because it reduces errors in construction and operations.

We have other examples of cities using ground radar to discover where current underground utility infrastructure is located. This saves them the cost of initially digging up the street for the survey of a reconstruction project. They typically dig up the street to survey the current underground situation, perform the engineering design, and then start the actual project. By using ground radar and converting 2D into a 3D model, you don’t have to open up the street, saving hundreds of thousands of dollars, and justifying the cost of building the model for just one project.

V1: I really like the geospatial scale modeling that you do, but also the managed environment that ProjectWise provides. It’s certainly not easy to integrate a BIM model into broader geospatial visualization.

De Vries: We’ve been working on integrating various levels of detail coming from a high level of engineering detail in a BIM model, into a more generic 3D city model. Of course, you can incorporate all your BIM models in a geospatially oriented and located environment, but that probably won’t work in the long term. Files and databases become too large and too detailed, and the right information can no longer be found. A better way is to extract a simplified model from the BIM model, and integrate the city model and link it to the original BIM information. The process can then be managed with the Bentley Geospatial Server and ProjectWise, to achieve better visualization, performance, and detail. By clicking on the BIM model you can load all the details you want.

This process creates an integrated 3D city model on the Level 2 or 3 scale, but to achieve a higher level of detail or to see the full BIM model, you simply click on it. It appears in the same interface, and is seamless within the same software interface.

It provides the flexibility to create a 3D city model step by step. Many cities might start with a LiDAR survey of the entire city, and generate a Level 2 model out of it with roofs and building facades. Then when there is a project planned for a specific area, the detailing can begin in the model and all the BIM models from the architects and engineers are brought in. The level of intelligence in the city model is gradually built up over time.

V1: I saw that there were quite a few new capabilities within your new Bentley Map products to create a 3D city model with your new release last week.

De Vries: We’ve released Bentley Map Enterprise at the highest level of modeling and 3D GIS capability. It includes all the basic mapping functionality, cadastral functionality, 3D analysis and clash detection functionality, and the texturing and modeling functionality. It captures digital photographs of the city and warps them onto the model by assigning corner points. It’s an easy and integrated way of building the 3D city model from a simple Level 1 block model to a Level 3 or 4 textured model in a single environment.

V1: Are a lot of the functionalities directly driven by market demand?

De Vries: Yes, especially for texturing and model building tools, there is a lot of demand in the market. And we are beginning to see excitement in the engineering community during our presentations and marketing efforts. The demand for 3D technology in the market is illustrated by our Year in Infrastructure publication, in which more than 90 percent of the projects have a strong 3D component.

These projects demonstrate that many companies worldwide approach construction and engineering as efficiently as possible to maximize their ROI and that is by deploying 3D technology.

V1: 3D seems to really be gaining momentum. We did an in-depth white paper for Safe Software on 3D data formats three years ago, and they knew they were a bit ahead of the curve. Now there is increasing demand.

De Vries: There is no going back. The world is 3D and we’re going to model it in 3D. When the Bentley brothers started working on MicroStation 27 years ago, they started with a 3D engine in mind. Our core products have always been 3D from the start.

One of the main changes that we’ve made in the last couple of years has been to focus on 3D city creation and management process, and what kind of functionality is needed in the process to make it easy for the user to create and maintain their 3D model. That’s made the difference, compared to the software that we had five to seven years ago. The core functionality has always been there.

The models we’re using as examples in our 3D city approach have been created by our users going back seven years. But now we’ve made it easier for them, and have addressed their needs with push-pull techniques, solids modeling, and with the CityGML schema we’re even better prepared to serve users at the city level.

V1: You’ve discussed in the past the sustainability angle as a reason for pushing 3D city modeling now for some of the efficiency and global change concerns.

De Vries: Cities are focused on serving the public. Any gain in efficiency allows them to reduce their costs and resources consumption. This helps them improve the quality of their service, the quality of their infrastructure, and the quality of life. The third vector is reducing risks by having a better understanding of how the changes impact the city.

3D city modeling contributes to all three vectors. It reduces cost by providing a more error-free construction environment. It improves quality by providing better analysis at the beginning of the project. For example, with a 3D model of a building, users can perform analysis for energy consumption and structural analysis, which makes buildings more resilient. It also reduces risks by knowing where your infrastructure is, as in the underground example I provided earlier.

Cities that moved to 3D have never gone back to a 2D environment. Building a 3D model is a one-time investment. Maintaining it is an ongoing expense that wouldn’t be continued if it didn’t provide benefits such as reduced costs, improved quality, and reduced risks. There are numerous arguments for moving in this direction, and it’s simply a matter of time before everyone takes that step.

V1: A curious observation is that urban planners still don’t use GIS or CAD very often, although use seems to be on the rise. Is the move to 3D something that will push them toward greater adoption?

De Vries: Five to seven years ago, 3D technology in CAD and GIS was available, but it wasn’t very easy to use. You needed to be a real expert, and it required a lot of extra hours to make a good model. With today’s functionality and technology it is affordable, it’s quick, and you don’t need to be a 3D guru in order to create and maintain a model. It still requires some training, but it’s much easier to operate.

V1: On the planning side, there are a number of converging trends and buzzwords. We spoke about sustainability, then there’s resiliency that was mentioned in the disaster planning scenario, and there’s also livability. The livability theme is a bit tricky, but it’s a harder concept to define.

De Vries: Livability has to do with people’s perceptions of how they should live. It has to do with how a city supports lifestyle aspirations. Especially in the planning area, a 3D model can help communicate to citizens what their city will look like, allowing direct and actionable feedback. Communications play a critical role in creating and maintaining a livable city and a 3D model can greatly improve that process.

It is a mechanism to support interaction with citizens and to communicate a vision of where a city wants to go, and it helps execute that vision.

V1: How far are we away from the move toward an intelligent model that informs design, and reacts to various inputs? We’re able to now design with more inputs, but the vision seems to be a tool that looks over our shoulders as we design and helps inform our design choices.

De Vries: In many areas that’s already happening. Water modeling tools help plan and design a water network. In general we see an improved interest from our traditional CAD and GIS users to incorporate engineering analyses into their design workflows. These analyses can be based on static information, like codes and standards or on dynamic, sensor-generated data.

What I’ve found in the discussion here at GITA about sensors is that the majority of outlooks are for reaction to real-time events in a reactive manner. Sensors can play a very important role there, whether those sensors are devices or citizens. But there are two other areas for sensors. Predictive applications use the data from sensors to schedule maintenance and other activities during the operation of assets in order to prevent failures. Another aspect of sensor data is learning from the experience of operating assets, and feeding that back into the planning and design process. Sensors that measure stresses in pipes let you know that pipes made of a certain material need to be replaced in 30 years based on the pressure and conditions. This helps decide what types of materials should be used, or if it is cheaper to schedule the replacement at specific intervals.

The earlier that the right decisions are made in the planning and design process, the more it will impact the costs over the design lifecycle. That’s true for every piece of infrastructure that we engineer, design, construct and operate.