LEADERS' OUTLOOK
Going Digital, for Infrastructure Resilience! BY GREG BENTLEY
A
CEO, Bentley Systems
s we look forward at the outset of 2022, having endured a global pandemic, we should prioritize making the most of what we’ve learned in response to vulnerabilities for which we were unprepared. I think it can objectively be said that ‘going digital’ has been the saving grace in enabling economic productivity to largely continue, and even gain new momentum.
ANNUAL EDITION / JANUARY-FEBRUARY 2022
I think the momentum in going digital will turn out to have been the crisis’ silver lining, in leading the way to improve the resilience of infrastructure. There is opportunity now to institutionalize going digital, not only within our organizations but also towards ‘future-proofing’ our world’s assets with respect to economic and environmental dependencies.
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Of necessity during the pandemic, going digital enabled ‘virtualizing’ infrastructure engineering and related professions. Today, any practitioner anywhere in the world can work on infrastructure projects anywhere (else), WITH anyone.
Digital acceleration
Most infrastructure engineering organizations, having surmounted unimagined challenges, have actually grown their scope and profits during the pandemic. By going digital, they have proved and improved their resilience and are consequently more future-proof.
The priority must be to continue and accelerate going digital. New pandemic-spawned patterns of work and life have substantially disrupted the requirements for infrastructure’s fitness for purpose. Coping with unexpected exposures has increased the world’s determination to achieve and sustain the adaptation needed for overall economic and environmental resilience. The daunting cost of new infrastructure capacity means this can be effective only at the margins, and hence the priority must be the necessary extension of the useful life of infrastructure assets, with the added imperatives of energy transition and climate threats. Just in time to meet these challenges, further benefits of going digital are at hand and are accelerating, with infrastructure Digital Twin advancements gaining adoption. Bentley Systems (BSY)’s 2021 Year in Infrastructure (virtual) Conference served to highlight this momentum. The Going Digital Awards reflected independent juries’ assessments of the hundreds of infrastructure projects nominated by BSY users globally. The 2021 Infrastructure Yearbook (www.bentley.com/ yearbook), presenting all of the nominations, winners, finalists, and founders’ honorees, provides an informative and encouraging perspective on advancements towards infrastructure resilience now being enabled by ongoing pandemic-spurred inflections.
Infrastructure Digital Twins require federating together, in Cloud services, each of digital context, for reality (reflecting ‘OT’ via operational technologies), digital components, for veracity (leveraging ‘ET’ from engineering technologies), and digital chronology, for fidelity (by virtue of ‘IT’ comprising information technologies). In achieving these Digital Twin thresholds, significant and auspicious progress was observable during the pandemic.
Digital context
An essential prerequisite for an infrastructure Digital Twin is to capture and continuously maintain an asset or project’s digital context, its 3D-surveyed reality. With pandemic restrictions curtailing physical site access, drones and associated surveying innovations were applied with reality modeling software to support, for example, increasingly autonomous inspections. At BSY, we observed significant related milestones: 36 percent of the (57) 2021 Going Digital Award finalist projects credit reality modeling; AEC Advisors’ inaugural Going Digital survey of AEC firms’ CEOs in October 2021 indicated that more than half have invested in and are offering UAV surveying services; With Collins Engineering and the Minnesota DoT, BSY was recognized by Microsoft (North America) as the Mixed Reality
