Bentley Systems has expanded its strategic alliance focused on advancing infrastructure for smart city urban planning and smart construction.
The alliance will combine Microsoft’s Azure IoT Digital Twins and Azure Maps with Bentley Systems’ iTwins platform, enabling engineers, architects, constructors and city planners to work within a comprehensive city-scale digital twin, empowering better decision-making, optimising operational efficiency, reducing costs and improving collaboration.
Microsoft and Bentley Systems, a leader in engineering software for professionals to design, build, operate and maintain critical infrastructure such as road and rail networks, and public works and utilities, will collaborate to develop new smart city solutions. The companies will explore opportunities for digital twins in urban planning and citizen engagement for cities around the world. The collaboration will enable improved decision-making and increased productivity through Microsoft Teams for infrastructure engineers.
“At Bentley we believe that infrastructure digital twins can empower engineers, constructors and owner-operators to design, build and operate infrastructure assets that are more cost-effective, more resilient and more sustainable,” said Greg Bentley, CEO, Bentley Systems. “With Azure as the foundation of our cloud services, our offerings are more broadly scaled and differentiated by the further integrations of Microsoft technologies. We are excited to extend our partnership to bring new digital twin advances to infrastructure engineering organizations and their constituents.”
The capital city of Dublin, Ireland, with a population of more than 1.2 million, is working with Bentley Systems to develop a large-scale digital twin as part of the city’s planning efforts.
“To overcome the challenges of getting public review and comment for new development projects in Dublin during the pandemic, we turned to Microsoft and Bentley to create an interactive virtual environment to ensure our citizens could provide their input from the safety of their homes and keep the development projects on track,” said Jamie Cudden, smart city program manager at Dublin City Council.
“The impact of the pandemic has forced cities like Dublin to accelerate their digital transformation journeys. Working with Microsoft and Bentley we are reimagining how interactive virtual environments and digital twins can support citizens to engage from the safety of their own home on new development projects in their local communities.
Working with these technology partners, we are building an adaptable and scalable solution based on Microsoft Teams and Bentley’s OpenCities Planner that will set the standard for the future of planning and public engagement in cities.”
In addition to sustaining infrastructure development in smart cities, project digital twins are facilitating industrial construction. Bentley Systems was recognized by Microsoft as the 2020 MSUS Partner Award winner for the Industry-Automotive category, in which an automotive factory uses the HoloLens 2 with Bentley’s SYNCHRO 4D construction-modeling software.
