Bentley’s Vision Matures

By on 11 October, 2017

iModel image, courtesy of Bentley Systems

JON FAIRALL

It is no secret that the big story about infrastructure at the moment is the inefficiency with which it is designed, constructed and operated. The good news is that we have the tools to deal with the problem.

Whether we have the will is another question entirely.

At least, that is what seemed to be the take home message from the Year in Infrastructure 2017, Bentley Systems’ annual user conference being held in Singapore this week.

Hosting a media conference before the start of the meeting, the company’s CEO Greg Bentley laid the blame squarely on poor use of information technology.

He said that when the computerised description of  reality is inadequate, it becomes impossible to design correctly, impossible to build efficiently and impossible to operate well. The key issue is not that we lack IT tools to assist in all these functions, but that they don’t talk to each other.

Fixing data connectivity issues is more than a good idea pushed by IT nerds. It has profound economic significance.

Bentley argued that one of the most difficult problems in modern economics is funding the cost of new infrastructure. Paradoxically, the problem is not a lack of money. The world is awash with money, provided one can offer a decent return. But Bentley quoted a recent survey that suggests a $1.6 trillion shortfall in the global level of investment in infrastructure.

This is a conundrum. Investment in infrastructure ought to provide a better balance of risk and return than any other asset class. After all, roads, rails and ports last for decades, go nowhere and do nothing except earn money for their owners. To be sure, infrastructure doesn’t provide as much return as some types of investment, but bigger returns involve bigger risks.

Yet investors shy away from the investment in infrastructure, and Bentley thinks he knows why.

His argument is that, if you drill down into the detail, infrastructure investment is actually far from safe. And that, he says, is mainly because the cost of construction is uncertain.

Bruce Middleton, Bentley’s vice president for Asia Pacific, says that in traditional engineering models, data is often lost and inefficiently recreated at the interface between design and construction, which manifests as mistakes, reworks and project inefficiency.

He says the best surveys suggest that on average globally, infrastructure projects exceed their initial budget by a whopping 30 per cent. If this is anywhere near correct, it is no wonder financiers and accountants treat infrastructure investment opportunities with disdain.

Of course, the significance of data connectivity has been understood for many years and applied to many different industries, where it has underpinned massive increases in productivity. But the sheer complexity of infrastructure design, build and operations has defeated most attempts to connect up digital data in the industry.

One of the key pieces to the puzzle appears to be Bentley’s new iModel2.0 cloud platform and the iModelHub cloud service, both of which were introduced during the conference by the company’s chief technology officer, Keith Bentley.

An iModel is a digital model of a component. It could be a pump, a motor, a stormwater drain or any other item one cares to define. The original iModel was designed to be fully self describing, but it was not designed to be understood across disciplines. The power of the new version is that this iModel can be understood by all of Bentley’s many different applications that cover all the domains of infrastructure design and construction.

Importantly, new linkages to Microsoft’s Azure cloud service ensure a fully connected project. Azure synchronises project changes and updaties the iModel, highlighting progress and risk in all the disciplines involved in the project.

Of course, no one is suggesting that new data methodologies will be a complete cure for the problem of funding new infrastructure. Political differences and common-or-garden venality must take some of the blame. Nevertheless, the worldwide nature of the problem suggests that inefficiency is inherent in the way modern engineering works.

Just maybe, better information management is the key.

Jon Fairall was the foundation editor of Position Magazine, and now works as a freelance journalist and author.

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