CC1811

SOFTWARE review
An ecosystem of innovation
JavaScript's flexible and simple web-enabling application gives Bentley's iModel the muscle it needs
to create its industry leading 'digital twin' environments
It's funny how phrases catch on and
become part of the general idiom.
Prior to the term 'digital twins' being
used by Bentley in a press release
earlier this year, which introduced the
concept in its partnership with
Siemens, and which we wrote about in
general terms in the last issue, we have
seen the concept being used in a
financial ad on TV and referenced on
numerous other occasions elsewhere. I
even hijacked the term for a blog on an
entirely different subject - the creation
of 'digital twins' for patients that could
supercede the horrendous
accumulation of paper records in the
care industry.
Digital twins entails the creation of
digital models that that can be used to
simulate the real world, providing an
immersive experience connected to a
digital environment that allows users to
create and analyse scenarios, develop
applications, and model processes
before implementation within a project.
To enable it, Bentley Systems has
developed extensions to its iModel data
sharing format, and facilitated its use
within immersive applications using
JavaScript. The Open Source format
iModel is already the de facto means of
sharing data between Bentley System
models and other applications. At the
Year in Infrastructure conference in
London this year, the company released
the first part of its iModel.js.library,
which improves the way in which
developers and IT professionals can
create applications that connect their
infrastructure digital twins with other
parts of the digital world.
A totally Connected Data Environment
can now be created using the iModel.js
library as part of Bentley's also newly
announced iTwin Services, combining
iModelHub, reality modelling and other
web-enabling technologies. iModelHub
manages the iModel as a distributed
database forming the backbone of an
infrastructure digital twin, which
records model changes and other
revisions, to provide a totally aligned,
accessible and accountable source of
information for infrastructure
engineering. This can include analytics,
artificial intelligence (AI), and machine
learning (ML) and other information
used in simulations and for decision
support throughout design,
construction and operations.
Infrastructure projects typically involve
many collaborating disciplines with
distributed teams making thousands of
asynchronous decisions and changes.
Digital twins using iModelHub provide
the first practical solution for aligning
disparate data and synchronising all of
the changes to reflect conditions in the
real world.
The ProjectWise Common Data
Environment records changes to digital
engineering models using iModel
Bridge Services within the iModelHub,
maintaining a timeline of what changes
were made to engineering data, when
they was made, and by whom.
Engineers and other project
members, through their applications,
can obtain a copy of the iModel from
iModelHub with notifications of
changes added to the iModel's
timeline, which they can accept and
apply to their copy of the iModel,
thereby synchronising it. Any version of
the iModel can be accessed, and
significant versions can be named.
There's a whole family of 'twinning'
building up here, but a fundamental
first principle of iTwin Services is
allowing the disciplines in a project to
continue to use their existing
applications and not require them to
change the way they work. Project
participants manage their work in
ProjectWise, as they have always done.
They contribute the digital engineering
models as hundreds of individual files
from a variety of authoring applications
in their native source formats.
ProjectWise uses the iModel Bridge
Service to aggregate those file-based
models into an aligned form - the
iModel within the iModelHub - then
semantically structures engineering
data in a consistent manner that iTwin
Services can understand. iModels
contain knowledge of how physical
elements and functional requirements
relate to one another. They include the
relationships between physical and
analytical models, and capture
discipline-specific concepts to enable
appropriate logic to be applied.
THE IMODEL.JS LIBRARY
The widely used and flexible JavaScript
is a dynamic computer programming
language (not to be confused with
Java, itself an entirely separate
programming language used to create
virtual machines) and is most
commonly used to facilitate the
dynamic exchange of data between the
14
November/December 2018