BIM News

It is time for the industry to apply digital technology on infrastructure projects to close the productivity gap with other industries. In its journey to digitalization, Bentley Systems has been announcing several digital cities initiatives this 2019, which aim to apply digital twin technology for more efficient cities and more connected and resilient infrastructure.

Among the solutions that have been most successful and accepted by users, the OpenCities Planner stands out, by enabling visualization of 2D, 3D and GIS data in a 3D world, and what’s more amazing, by involving citizens in the process of digitalization. In words of the Senior Director Business Development Digital Cities at Bentley Systems, Ton De Vries: “OpenCities Planner is a planning and communication solution, which really allows the city to engage citizens in the whole planning process. And that’s important for cities, because they are growing so fast, and in this process new infrastructure need to be built.” 

Mostly times, this changes and constructions happen at citizens properties and because of that, they wanna know what’s going on. “If they can see this evolution online in the context of the reality, then it becomes clearer what’s gonna happen in my city”, states De Vries. With that, the amount of complaints from citizens reduce notably.

“The second thing what they accomplished − explains Ton De Vries− is that every citizen is now able to provide comments on those plans, so it’s not only the people that show up at a town hall meeting that are against it, but also people that are in favor of those changes that can share their comments easily in an online forum, or via their phone or a tablet.” 

This software’s capabilities combined with Bentley’s reality modeling offerings make city-scale digital twins broadly accessible, as the city of Helsinki is already applying.

What is clear is that with tools like the OpenCities Planner, the global provider of software and digital twin cloud services, Bentley Systems, is seeking to ‘ramp’ infrastructure engineering digital twins to full city scale to help tackle a variety of challenges.