Bentley Systems launches expansions for iTwin Platform

Bentley Systems Incorporated, an infrastructure engineering software company, announced new capabilities for its iTwin Platform.

The iTwin Platform is an open, scalable cloud service for creating, visualizing, and analyzing digital twins of infrastructure assets. The company announced the new capabilities on Tuesday, Nov. 15 at its 2022 Year in Infrastructure Conference.

The new iTwin Platform capabilities will power Bentley Infrastructure Cloud, a set of solutions that span the end-to-end infrastructure lifecycle and value chain, encompassing ProjectWise, SYNCHRO, and AssetWise, unified and made interoperable by Bentley’s infrastructure schemas.

Bentley says that the enhancements will significantly extend the scope and interoperability of infrastructure data that engineering firms and owner-operators can use to create and leverage digital twins in design, construction, and operations workflows.

iTwin Experience is a new cloud product to support owner-operators’ and their constituents’ insights into infrastructure by visualizing and navigating digital twins. The product helps create and curate asset-specific digital twins, incorporating machine learning, analytics, and asset performance algorithms.

The company says that iTwin Experience acts as a “single pane of glass,” overlaying engineering technology (ET), operations technology (OT), and information technology (IT) to enable users to visualize, query, and analyze infrastructure digital twins at any level of granularity, at any scale, all geo-coordinated and fully searchable.

Additional iTwin products include:

iTwin Capture enables users to create engineering-ready 3D models of infrastructure assets using drone video and survey imagery.

iTwin Capture, for capturing, analyzing, and sharing reality data, enables users to create engineering-ready 3D models of infrastructure assets using drone video and survey imagery from digital cameras, scanners, or mobile mapping devices. Infrastructure digital twins of existing assets can accordingly start with reality modeling, rather than requiring a BIM model.

iTwin IoT, for acquiring and analyzing sensor data, enables users to incorporate Internet of Things (IoT) data created by sensors and condition monitoring devices. Infrastructure IoT can be used for real-time safety and risk monitoring in operations and construction activities, including to measure and visualize environmental changes, structural movement, or deterioration for condition assessment, maintenance scheduling, and to prompt precautionary interventions.

iTwin IoT enables users to incorporate IoT data created by sensors and condition monitoring devices.

iTwin's Movement to Phase 2

Bentley’s 2022 Going Digital Awards coincided with its Year in Infrastructure Conference. In the awards program, the proportion of finalists crediting iTwin reached 42 percent.

In the keynote address, founder and CTO Keith Bentley described the evolution of iTwin from a set of open-source programming libraries to a platform-as-a-service used by Bentley and partners to develop, run, and extend applications that use digital twin workflows.

Bentley’s engineering applications will next take advantage of iTwin capabilities on the desktop. Users will continue to work with these applications as they are accustomed to, but alongside the usual resulting .dgn file, the engineering applications will also create and synchronize an iModel, Bentley’s specialized container to semantically align and federate infrastructure engineering data within digital twins. iModel and iTwin will enable integration, validation of design intent, rules checking, clash detection, component queries and reuse, quality assurance, and digital-twin deliverables creation.

“Phase 2 of our journey involves improving our existing desktop products using the same iTwin engine,” said Keith Bentley at the keynote. “Users of our MicroStation and engineering design and analysis applications will next gain new features that can make their projects more efficient, more connected, and the results more valuable. We can do that by augmenting, not replacing, their existing tools, workflows, file formats, and deliverables. The iTwin engine will run on the same desktop ‘in process’ with the design applications, synchronizing a local iModel and connecting to cloud services when and as necessary.”

Integration with 3D Environments

At the same time, Julien Moutte, vice president of technology, described the enhanced interoperability of the iTwin Platform, including integration with 3D environments, such as Unreal, Unity, and NVIDIA Omniverse, to function across a wide range of devices.

“We are now opening the doors of the metaverse for those digital twins, enabling new use cases and immersive experiences,” said Moutte. “Our interoperability with game engines via USD, glTF, DataSmith, and 3DFT unlocks a whole new world of possibilities for application developers. We are excited to see what our users can achieve by combining such technologies, which are fundamental building blocks of the infrastructure metaverse.”

Describing the broadening ecosystem adoption of iTwin technologies, Moutte announced that Adobe has licensed Bentley’s iTwin Capture for its Substance 3D Sampler application, which enables designers to transform real-life pictures into a photorealistic surface or environment.

Availability

iTwin Experience is in early access; iTwin Capture and iTwin IoT are available now. iTwin Experience incorporates capabilities from OpenCities Planner. iTwin Capture incorporates capabilities from ContextCapture and Orbit 3DM. iTwin IoT incorporates capabilities from the sensemetrics platform and Vista Data Vision. More information is available at www.bentley.com.