Designers and contractors demonstrated how they’ve taken digital twins from conceptual buzzword to real-world applications at Bentley Systems’ Year in Infrastructure conference, held in Singapore Oct. 21-24. While the software and cloud services firm did announce several strategic acquisitions and developments, most of the focus was placed on helping the hundreds of software users in attendance to delve deep into the myriad uses of digital twins along the entire lifecycle of their projects, from design to construction to operations.

“It’s an amazing experience to see all the software and what you can actually do on your projects using them,” says Bayan O. Abdel Rahman, 4D planning specialist with Dubai-based contractor ALEC.

在YII的一项关键公告中，本特利和Topcon定位系统公开宣布了50-50个合资咨询业务，称为数字建筑工程。DCW将帮助客户实施数字化转型解决方案，例如高级工作包装，测量，现实建模和其他高级工具的4D创新。本特利系统首席执行官格雷格·本特利（Greg Bentley）表示，新业务将致力于“缩小进步差距”。这是公司之间五年联盟的高潮。

Topcon President and CEO Ray O’Connor traced the venture’s roots to academies held in 2016 that brought engineers and contractors together. “What we learned was that engineers are not necessarily discussing with contractors how they do their work. How do you automate the entire workflow if you don't understand how the people you're sending designs to do the work?”

本特利（Bentley）和Topcon都投资了人力资本和资金，在整合业务上投入了资金。在DCW的50名员工中，新任首席执行官Ted Lamboo曾是本特利（Bentley）的战略合作伙伴关系高级副总裁，而新首席运营官杰森·哈雷特（Jason Hallett）则是参与全球业务发展和数字建筑计划的顶级副总裁。DCW还在攻击建筑行业领域专家，例如Marvin Johnson，Marvin Johnson，这是一位以前曾在Bechtel Corp的数字双胞胎专家。

重要的是，Lamboo表示，向客户推荐技术工具时，DCW将是“不可知论的”。它将与客户的旧系统合作，并集成实现客户目标的任何其他工具 - 来自Bentley，TopCon或任何其他供应商的工具。已经进行了DCW工作的客户包括用于Shell的高级工作包实施和Balfour Beatty的咨询。Balfour Beatty的数字项目交付负责人Harry Parnell表示：“将完整的数字构建解决方案（例如DCW提供的业务）实现，将使我们能够实现我们的项目成果和业务目标。”

Lamboo说，DCW将与客户讨论“基于结果的业务模型”，尤其是在高级工作包实施方面，DCW的收入是其工作为该项目产生的储蓄的一定百分比。与O3 Solutions Inc.宣布的联盟有助于实现这一目标。首席执行官乔什·吉尔文（Josh Girvin）表示，O3的流程测量软件衡量结果，并告诉用户他们离项目目标有多近。

现实世界项目应用程序

A major component of the conference revolves around the Year in Infrastructure awards, where 571 entries competed in 18 categories. Three finalists were selected by the judges in each category and presented their digitization accomplishments to conference attendees and judges and showed off the challenges that can be solved by implementing Bentley’s software and digital twin services.

For example, at the 18,000-seat Chase Center Warriors Arena in San Francisco, the Mortenson Clark joint venture met an immoveable deadline for the opening game of the basketball team recently despite site constraints from helicopter flight paths, an adjacent hospital and nine neighboring construction sites. An intensive application of Synchro 4D Construction Modeling tools coordinated the movements of five tower cranes, two crawler cranes, 36,700 scheduled tasks and 93,000 scheduled relationships. Michal D. Wojtak, integrated construction director for sports and entertainment at Mortenson, said the $1.4-billion arena put in place “560% more volume of work in the same time frame” than the Sprint Center Arena, the first Mortenson sports project where 4D modeling was used. He said, “4D Synchro Modeling was a critical solution for us.”

In another example, a team created a high resolution digital model of the Saudi Arabian city of Medina, one of two great holy cities of the Muslim world. Five companies responded to the city’s request for proposals for high resolution mapping. Four proposed conventional surveys, and one proposed using a hybrid mix of drone and mobile Lidar mapping technologies, according to Khalid F. Sallam, manager of the geomatics unit at AHCEC Engineering, based in Al Khobar, 600 miles to the east.

AHCEC提出使用无人机在大约一半的成本中预期时间的一半来完成该项目。纽约市当局很感兴趣，在10天内，他们为他们提议做的事情提供了5平方公里的样本。

“When we showed the model, they said yes on the spot,” Sallam says. That led to a negotiated contract in Dec. 2018, and ACEC’s next challenge, which was to scale up to 50 km and deliver LOD 3 mapping for the entire city, with its 7,104 km of streets, as well as a LOD 4 reality model for The Prophet’s mosque — in one year.

Sallam说，所需的数据和处理量是巨大的。该公司在定居Bentley的上下文捕获之前测试了四个空中图像处理服务，这是唯一可以同时进行同一模型同时处理的测试者中的唯一一个。它选择了现成的DGI Phantom 4无人机，其相机具有机械性，而不是数字百叶窗来消除运动模糊。

AHCEC trained five local pilots, but automated the flying using Drone Deploy to eliminate variations in the human pilots’ flying styles. It broke the project up into 7,306 cells, or missions. Each flight automatically ticked off a cell in the project plan as it was completed, and Sallam monitored the progress from his office in Khobar where a 200 Tb NAS filer collected the processed data.

The company also used ground-based, vehicle-mounted data acquisition tools and Orbit GT, a mobile mapping system recently acquired by Bentley, to process and drape still, 360 degree and panoramic imagery on LiDar data, to fill in the blanks in the ancient parts of town where the narrow streets and roof overhangs interfered with drone data acquisition.

The deliverable, by the end of the year, includes a trained set of pilots and technicians with the skills to maintain the model, as well as that big server holding the data. The city planners expect to use the model to help them plan for expanded capacity to accommodate the pilgrims who come to Medina up to 30 million people by 2030, from 8 million who came in 2015, and to increase the capacity of the Prophet’s mosque to 4 million worshipers annually, from the 1 million who came to pray in 2012.

格雷格·本特利（Greg Bentley）说，数字城市已成为本特利系统的“新领域”。除了收购Orbit GT外，Bentley还宣布购买Citilabs，该公司提供了模拟移动性的预测运输软件。

But to solve real-world problems with a digital twin of a city, planners must start with a problem to solve and look at it from the citizen’s perspective, says Ayesha Khanna, CEO and co-founder of ADDO AI, in her keynote address. “Too long have smart cities been defined by how high tech they are. We have to stop that now. The kind of smart city that you want is one that is taking care of the needs of its citizens every single day.”

透过霍洛伦斯看

At the conference, a limited number of units of the Microsoft HoloLens 2 augmented reality headsets were on display and available for individual demonstrations. The second iteration of the HoloLens shown were running features co-developed in an special partnership with Bentley Systems that make it readily apparent how far the system has advanced toward practical applications.

无线单位迪splayed are built into a comfortable head strap similar to the lining of a hard hat, with a knob on the back to adjust fit. The peripheral vision range has been expanded and the translucent lens can fold up for unobstructed vision, although it barely interferes with normal vision when down and superimposed with information and images.

一旦新用户将设备放在头上，就需要在背景中进行视网膜扫描，然后再进行一系列视觉和手指指向练习，以自定义将显示的图形，并根据佩戴者的个人视觉需求进行调整。每个单元都可以由许多人使用，但是每次以前的用户再次穿上它时，它都会读取他们的视网膜，并像以前一样自动将校准与他们的眼睛匹配。

The features demonstrated that were developed with the help of the Bentley team included one to let multiple users collaboratively examine a 3D building model, which is called into visual existence by glancing at a QR code. The multi-story model could be constructed or deconstructed with the help of a finger-tip adjustable timeline slider floating in air to the right. It also included a sectioning tool for slicing the model along the X, Y, or XYZ axis that was so intuitive to use no instruction was required. Flags can be dropped onto it to indicate areas of interest for discussions of risk or other issues.

另一个在空气中漂浮的按钮的虚拟触摸使该模型达到了全面的规模，使佩戴者可以在其内部走动，并使用诸如在设备上调用元数据，勾选检查清单并捕获有关对象使用语音到文本识别的对象的注释。

只有少数Hololens 2个单元在循环中，Bentley和Microsoft展出了六个预生产单元。但是据说微软即将投入生产，为美国国防部提供一阶批次。自2016年以来，Bentley的Synchro 4D一直与HoloLens合作，并在2018年正式加入Microsoft Mixh Reality合作伙伴计划。