LAYING THE GROUNDWORK FOR THE DIGITAL
CONSTRUCTION SITE DUSTIN PARKMAN OF BENTLEY SYSTEMS SPEAKS TO ROADS & INFRASTRUCTURE MAGAZINE ABOUT NEW DIGITAL WORKFLOWS FOR CONSTRUCTION SITE DESIGN AND DELIVERY AND WHERE THE SOFTWARE PROVIDER’S LATEST CIVIL PRODUCT – OPENSITE – FITS IN THE EQUATION.
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n 2016, Bentley Systems launched its OpenRoads and OpenBridge Designer brands. In 2017, it added OpenRail to its portfolio of digital design applications for the infrastructure market. For the past three years, Bentley has been updating its entire suite of civil design products, aligning them more with building information modelling (BIM) workflows and analysis tools. Complementing the range of updates released in the past few years is OpenSite, which was announced at the Year in Infrastructure 2018 Conference in London late last year. Roads & Infrastructure Magazine was at the conference for the release and spoke with Dustin Parkman, Bentley’s Vice President of Civil Modelling and Visualization. Mr. Parkman explains what OpenSite means for infrastructure projects and how digital workflows are changing the nature of civil project delivery. “In the old way of doing things, civil engineers would have a design application that did road, drainage [and] a couple of the big assets; and maybe 2D analytical stuff. What we have been doing, and this has been an effort that started seven years ago, is building a whole new civil foundation for BIM and analysis. It started with OpenRoads designer in 2016, which we announced at that year’s Year in Infrastructure Conference,” Mr. Parkman explains. Mr. Parkman adds that many of the fundamentals that comprise OpenRoads are also featured in OpenSite, but not in a linear context. “OpenSite is not linear – you’re more interested in pads, ponds and grading and it’s really more commoditised. It’s about cost savings and being able to rapidly design and build with a profitable margin.” OpenSite has a range of modelling
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ROADS FEBRUARY 2019
Dustin Parkman presenting at Bentley’s 2018 Year in Infrastructure in London.
applications for site construction projects, such as geotechnical, subsurface drainage and utilities. OpenSite users can also interface with high-end analysis products, such as PLAXIS – geotechnical engineering software that Bentley acquired in 2018. “PLAXIS is really about analysing the impact of the soil condition and how that relates to a subsurface structure, whether that relates to a piling, a tunnel – it could be a retaining wall that has earth against it,” Mr. Parkman explains. “It gives users the ability to understand soil conditions and how that behaves with a structure, so that you can prevent things like structural failure.” OpenSite allows engineers to analyse and design for not only the site, but the complex and intricate aspects of the project and how they interact with each other, including hydraulics, utilities, geotechnical aspects, the site modelling for pads, ponds and interfacing with buildings whether through Bentley Systems’ OpenBuilding products or
other kinds of multidiscipline systems. “One of OpenSite’s key financial benefits is that it can provide more context than any other civil design product in the world. The application allows you to bring in all these things so you can make better decisions quickly, in a much more digital context, whether on [the] low- or high-fidelity side,” Mr. Parkman explains. The application can be quite high in fidelity, utilising extremely detailed survey inputs like LiDAR, reality models or groundpenetrating radar for existing utilities to prevent clashes. “All of this information and context can be taken into consideration during the analysis.” Cut-and-fill analysis of earthworks, for instance, isn’t a new concept, but Mr. Parkman says that OpenSite provides a major difference in that its optimisation engine will run millions of options to determine the most cost-effective model and show different scenarios to take into consideration
