Putting the Digital Twin to Work

Machine Design: Bentley and Siemens long have collaborated around the concept of a digital twin. Siemensstadt looks to be a very visible way of demonstrating the design and operational potential of the digital twin. Talk a little bit about this journey that Siemens and Bentley have taken to get to this point.

Nicholas Cumins: Bentley and Siemens announced their strategic partnership in 2016 to co-develop and co-sell digital twin solutions for infrastructure. Our joint focus is on process industries, rail and transit, and urban-built environments. 

Bentley is strong in infrastructure engineering technology and Siemens is strong in operations technology. By putting our complementary strengths together to work across the lifecycle of the infrastructure, we are helping our users better design, build and operate better infrastructure.

The partnership is also about furthering our joint thought leadership in technology, as demonstrated at the recent Siemens Business Media Day in Berlin, where we presented the outlines of the emerging infrastructure metaverse.

In 2021 after a competitive bid, Bentley was awarded a contract by Siemens Real Estate to create a digital twin of the Siemensstadt district in Berlin. The project started the same year, and since then use cases and usage have scaled.

As the CEO of Siemens Digital Industries Cedrik Neike explained in May, together with the mayor of Berlin Franziska Giffey, the objective is to use the digital twin of the district to simulate and test in the digital world first—to make Siemensstadt more sustainable, more inclusive and more livable in the real world.

MD: The Siemensstadt project now is in the design phase. What are some of the key considerations for designers as they look to bring all of these concepts together?

NC: Siemensstadt Square is a massive project. Around 1 million square meters of floor space will be built here by 2035 for industrial operations, commercial activities, research, education, residential units, temporary lodgings and social infrastructure.

As you can imagine, for a project of this scale and ambition, there is a wide variety of stakeholders to engage with, and the designers must take into consideration all the complex objectives of a hybrid city, bringing together space for living and working. This is why Siemens decided to create a holistic digital twin of Siemensstadt, to better plan and design the district, and then better build and operate it.

The digital twin includes not only the individual buildings, but also the infrastructure, including roads and open spaces as well as the supply of power and other utilities. The digital twin brings together a wide variety of data, all aligned with engineering precision to be leveraged in engineering workflows, all easily accessible to help the designers better coordinate with their stakeholders to make better design decisions.

The city planners have the ability to simulate and compare different scenarios to meet the objectives of the district—for example, carbon neutrality. They can integrate the designs from architectural competitions into the digital twin of Siemensstadt to better understand their impact. 

The general public has also access to the digital twin, so an added benefit is to facilitate the engagement with the community, to share progress, and get feedback and acceptance.

The digital twin becomes the single source of truth for all involved in the project, whether designers, city planners, local government officials or citizens, and later on construction firms and maintenance crews, all equipped with the right data in the right context, to make better informed decisions, leading to better outcomes.

MD: The finished project is many years off, but what are some of the things designers have already learned about a project of this size?

NC: The Siemensstadt Square project is fairly new, and as the project evolves it will surely drive changes in how the digital twin is used. Designers have learned to rely on the digital twin to access all the relevant information they need—for example, on a single module, building or lot.

Instead of looking for that information in various different files and systems, all the relevant data is now searchable or can be surfaced by a simple click on the related object in the 3D model of the district, making their workflows much more efficient.

The designers are also using the digital twin to do visual 3D volume studies of new proposed buildings while comparing them to the existing city structure and utilities. They can also do side-by-side comparison of proposed changes to a building with the existing conditions of that building, available in a high-resolution 3D model, derived from photographs or point clouds.

The designers use dashboards to do various KPI analyses while visualizing the results directly into the 3D model, making it easier for them to understand the impact of each decision.

The designers learned that having all that information in the same workspace not only makes their work easier, it empowers them to make better decisions.

MD: Bentley has presented its Year in Infrastructure and Going Digital Awards for many years. Are there lessons from your own users that have been beneficial as you’ve started to tackle this project?

NC: Absolutely. We launched our digital twin platform, iTwin, in 2018. More and more infrastructure projects presented for the Going Digital Awards are making use of iTwin—more than 25% of the finalists in 2021—and we expect that number to be even higher this year. We have been in awe with the ingenuity and variety of use cases for which our users have leveraged the technology. They are, in turn, informing our product strategy.

The infrastructure sector is very file-centric. A file, after all, is the main deliverable of an architecture or engineering firm. The problem is that the data in that file is not easily accessible. It is siloed and in different file formats. It grows stale. It becomes dark. We estimate that 95% of the data in our sector is not accessible or is not used. Decision-makers are making under-informed choices about their infrastructure because they lack visibility and insight.

Our users are leveraging iTwin and the digital twin technology to light up dark data, crack open files, view data in context, align it with engineering precision, and get it to the right person at the right time to make better decisions, leading to better outcomes.

They are doing this during the planning and design phase of an infrastructure project, like Siemensstadt today—but also during construction and operations. They do it for all types of infrastructure, whether buildings, plants, roads and rail, bridges and tunnels, the electric grid or the water network.

MD: As presented, Siemensstadt is expected to migrate from design to operations to optimization, all on the same digital twin platform. Is this the ultimate use of digital twin? And can small to mid-sized manufacturers benefit from a digital twin in the same way as is envisioned for Siemensstadt?

NC: Yes, digital twin technology provides tremendous value in all phases of the infrastructure lifecycle, not just planning and design. You can start using it during construction or directly during operations. The beauty of the technology is that it also allows you to mobilize data from one phase of the lifecycle to the next.

Siemens clearly intends to leverage the digital twin of the district during operations. For example, the district will be monitored with Siemens sensors that measure everything from energy consumption, water and carbon footprint. The data collected will be surfaced in the digital twin and used in predictive analytics to suggest if and where maintenance work will need to take place. All the relevant data collected during the design, construction and operations will be readily available for the maintenance teams to prepare and execute the work, significantly reducing the time, effort and risk involved.

To answer your question about whether small to mid-sized organizations can benefit from a digital twin, the answer is a resounding yes. This is not just for megaprojects. Using digital twin technology is very easy to start with. You can start by simply taking pictures of an existing infrastructure asset and from there create a 3D model to create a digital twin.

You can also upload a simple design model into the Bentley iTwin platform to create a digital twin. From there you can overlay additional information from disparate sources, whether engineering, operations or enterprise systems, as needed for your specific use cases. The threshold to start a digital twin journey is low and can scale over time.