How are Bentley’s latest technologies making cities, campuses and urban environments more sustainable, safe and inclusive?

Richard Vestner: Bentely’s comprehensive range of products and solutions build on the paradigm of an open, connected framework for interoperability in urban ecosystems, enabling data-driven decision-making. Openness, support and innovation are of great significance to unlock the potential in urban ecosystems and cities in order to make them smarter, faster and greener.

Throughout the life cycle of a city, having an end-to-end solution to federate, integrate and make data accessible is the strength that technology provides. With the iTwin platform and schema in Bentley Infrastructure Cloud, digital component data can be aligned, queried and managed as the foundation of digital twins that serve as building blocks for what we call infrastructure intelligence. As Bentley Systems’ CEO Greg Bentley pointed out at the Year in Infrastructure (YII) 2023 keynote address, doing more with less is critical to Bentley - with digital capabilities that achieve greater efficiency.

As part of interoperability, we want to innovate without disruption. We use the data sets available in cities and augment as well as complement them with multiple data sources. 

How is the digital twin technology helping projects in the Middle East to accelerate the smart city movement ?

Richard Vestner: Bentley’s technologies are used in Middle East projects through all stages of design, construction and operation. We have advanced our capabilities in the realm of cities and real estate, with technology including the Bentley Infrastructure Cloud and the iTwin platform. The Infrastructure Cloud is an integrated way to support an end to end solution through the whole life cycle of how infrastructure data is assembled, accessed, governed and transformed into valuable insights that drive outcomes. The ITwin platform is an open, scalable cloud platform for creating, visualising, and analysing digital twins of infrastructure assets.

What we are trying to do for these mega projects in the Gulf and the Middle East region is to bring the federation power and integrate the data for numerous applications and solutions that are still working in silos. Our mission is to deliver on expectations while respecting the principles empowering sustainable development goals.

What is the role of Bentley's products in retrofit and facilities management or property management? 

Richard Vestner: Due to increasing focus on climate change resilience and the ESG goals, reusing the existing embodied carbon and recycling of materials has a lot of potential in the built environment. Then, of course, the next step is to use the intelligence for reducing cooling, heating and other factors that will save us operational carbon or energy in that space. 

Beyond limiting our own environmental footprint, we see our responsibility in our handprint, to be advancing our users’ work and empowering sustainable development goals.