CU1711

TECHNOLOGYfocus
iModelHub
Introduced at the 2017 Year in Infrastructure Conference in October, Bentley's iModelHub has been
conceived to leverage change rather than fight it and represents an evolution in the way model
information is shared between project team members, writes David Chadwick
concept in infrastructure - Keith Bentley
argued in his keynote that we need a new
method of managing change, a better
solution for synchronising work in
infrastructure projects.
Having spent many years watching
the industry evolve - more even than
Keith Bentley, the founder and Chief
Technology Officer of Bentley Systems - I sat
up and took notice at the keynote speech at
this year's Year in Infrastructure Conference
when Keith announced that, instead of
fighting change and trying to force a natural
occurrence to behave as we would like it to,
the time has come for us to accept it and
manage it in a more mature manner.
Each new technological breakthrough,
software development and working process
involves change, and with it attempts to
minimise its impact by setting up standards
and formats for users to adopt: from the
very first operating systems and BASIC
programming languages, through
generations of floppy, hard and silicon disc
drives, to CAD, BIM and collaborative
worksharing. Bentley have taken part in this
process as well of course, with releases
such as the CONNECT Edition, which
integrates applications and information in a
CDE Connected Data Environment.
The latest of these breakthroughs is the
growth of cloud-based services, used to
share a 'single source of information', soon
followed, as Keith Bentley highlighted in his
keynote, by big data analytics, machine
learning, artificial intelligence, and
blockchain - the latest buzzwords for Chief
Information Officers and other technology
leaders in Infrastructure.
The problem is that people take on new
technological ideas and methods at
different rates. By the time the most Luddite
of us has adopted the latest technology, the
innovation leaders have moved on to the
next big thing - and companies behave in
much the same way, despite the pressures
to work collaboratively.
This is exacerbated by the increasing
complexity of infrastructure projects, with
many collaborating disciplines where work is
interconnected. As Keith Bentley explained,
these can require ''Thousands of
asynchronous decisions and changes for
material choices, design, aesthetics,
structural integrity, safety, and more.''
Constant and unrelenting change
characterises infrastructure projects, but
Instead of trying to fight that fact, Bentley
believes we should be designing our
systems from the ground up to manage
change. Instead of trying to maintain a
single model of a design as 'the current
record' - current being an ephemeral
A MODEL FOR THE FUTURE
The infrastructure industry has recognised
the value of the information being collected
from myriad technologies, tools and
workflows, believing that they can be
combined to form a conceptual database of
engineering decisions, processes and other
information, which can be used to minimise
risk and improve project efficiency by
leveraging new cloud-based services.
Project Managers and Asset owners
believe that new insights and benefits will
accrue from being able to leverage their
unstructured data through the
implementation of machine learning,
Artificial Intelligence and big data analytics
(those three buzzwords again).
The digital workflows they envision,
however, are simply impractical with the
current generation of engineering design
and information management tools that
were conceived and developed for local
networks of personal computers. The
conceptual database they worship is in fact
a disconnected array of ever-changing files
in formats defined by their authoring
applications, stored on servers in indivisible
and indigestible units.
The problem is how to retain a database of
consistent units, semantics and structure
that any authorised user can access without
impacting other users, and which operates
under the premise that the only constant is
change? I suppose we could address the
problem using quantum physics, but we are
still in the infancy of its application.
THE IMODEL 2.0 CLOUD PLATFORM
Thanks to the power of the cloud, Bentley
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November/December 2017