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CONFERENCES
Infrastructure intelligence
The focus of Bentley's 2023 Year in Infrastructure conference, besides honouring the illustrious finalists,
was advancing the cause of infrastructure intelligence, with specific reference to future AI trends
The choice of Singapore for Bentley's
Year in Infrastructure (YII) conference
was mightily endorsed by the Island
itself, an inspiring example of the power of
Infrastructure Intelligence to create and
run a modern and beautiful city, and yet
one of the greenest cities in the world. It is
also significant in that most of the
nominees in the accompanying awards
event come from the Asia/Pacific region -
some 90 out of 302 companies from 51
countries, presenting projects in
infrastructure engineering.
Infrastructure Intelligence was the principal
theme of the keynote speech by Greg
Bentley, CEO, who highlighted the strength
of the industry which is surging ahead
globally, galvanised by the advancements
in digital engineering, but battling against
an overstretched capacity, with an
estimated 10% shortfall in available
experienced workers, leading to a backlog
in engineering projects worldwide.
Efficiency gains, said Greg, were still
being achieved, though, with digital
innovations such as ContextCapture and
reality modelling being principal
components of the presentations from the
awards finalists, and construction
modelling becoming an infrastructure
engineering norm, with AI twin platforms
being credited by a majority of the finalists.
The conference, Greg suggested, was also
an opportunity for the world's press to meet
with the foremost practitioners in the
infrastructure industry to report, promote
and multiply the adoption of the latest
technologies worldwide.
Greg was joined on stage by Dr Victor
Khoo, Director of Survey and Geometrics at
the Singapore Land Authority (SLA), who
said that they were proactively adopting
Bentley's infrastructure engineering to solve
the challenge of rising temperatures in the
region, using digital twins to cope with the
increasing need to adapt to global
warming, and to improve the efficiency of
the SMRT metro system and other
infrastructure assets,
Bentley's Assetwise linear analytics
solution is the basis of SMRT's Decision
Support System, which optimises the
frequency and necessity of maintenance
scheduling, thereby saving maintenance
resources whilst improving the efficiency of
the service. The metro enables this by
bringing together all available engineering
technology data to analyse and understand
the rail infrastructure, leveraging the value
of infrastructure engineering.
The Singapore Public Utilities Board also
uses Bentley's OpenFlows Darwin genetic
algorithms and input from pressure and
volume sensor behaviour patterns to
predict and localise water system
anomalies, and thus buffer dangerous
wasteful leaks. Using the latest digital
innovations and acoustic signal analysis,
the resulting intelligence is available in
near real time.
A CAVEAT ABOUT AI
AI technology, however, promises more,
including the use of Microsoft's GiTHub,
and Generative AI, Bentley's co-founder
Keith Bentley has become an avid convert,
adopting the technology to advance his
own productivity, but also to assess and
adopt the undoubted benefits of AI, from
software engineering to infrastructure
engineering. With AI being used to
generate a significant proportion of the
routine code and documentation and test
case generation, Keith reported that GitHub
Copilot has significantly improved his
enjoyment of the work.
Whilst Keith benefited from the adoption
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November/December 2023