When Mark Biagi studied product design engineering at Glasgow University and Glasgow School of Art, mixing mechanical engineering and industrial design in an art-school setting seemed radical. But his undergraduate degree in product design engineering would prepare him for several roles, including stints at Schlumberger, ABB, Nokia and other design consultancies.
In hindsight, moving through various energy-related positions and combining those experiences with an MPhil in engineering for sustainable development from Cambridge University in 2004 equipped him with knowledge in environmental issues, economics and social development—the expertise he brought to his role when he first joined Bentley Systems in 2007.
Going Digital in Infrastructure Impacts Going Sustainable
Biagi said he joined the infrastructure software firm when “sustainability had not yet gained the industrial context in which we now understand it.”
READ MORE: Digital Twins: Designing Virtual Replicas of Infrastructure Projects
At best, the pursuit for sustainable development in engineering would have been in its incipient stages. The United Nations General Assembly defined sustainable development in 1987 as “an approach to growth and human development that aims to meet the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” And it wasn’t until 2015 that the Paris Agreement became the first legally binding international treaty on climate change, requiring signatories to limit global warming to 1.5°C.
Sustainability has since erupted into the digital age and brought along new roles that espouse ESG-friendly practices. An analysis by McKinsey & Company, for instance, shows that companies that excel at profitability and growth while improving sustainability and ESG tend to outpace peers and exceed them in shareholder returns.
However, some firms adapt to this change more quickly than others. Those that do are thinking not just about the short-term costs associated with sustainability, but also the long-term benefits. Biagi’s employer, for example, has created a way for customers to engage in their digital and sustainability transformation journey while also rewarding them through the Bentley Systems’ Year in Infrastructure – Going Digital Awards.
Sustainable Practices in Process and Power Generation Infrastructure
Headquartered in Pennsylvania, Bentley Software helps engineers design, build and operate infrastructure products around the world. The firm’s infrastructure awards program honors the innovative work that customers put into advancing infrastructure projects.
Project submissions are judged according to set criteria, including technical innovation, process/workflow improvements, organization or regional impact, return on investment and environmental impact. Projects also need to demonstrate the use of digital delivery tools for improving asset performance and reducing operating costs—albeit with the use of Bentley’s extensive infrastructure playbook, ranging from AssetWise, iTwin, iTwin Capture, PlantSight, OpenPlant, OpenBuildings and OpenWindPower to AutoPIPE, ProjectWise, MicroStation and SYNCHRO.
“We’ve grown and adapted the criteria by which we want to measure projects, but a lot of it now is very focused on sustainability, on environmentally sustainable governance and in those aspects leading towards the energy transition,” said Biagi, whose portfolio fittingly includes presiding over the award program’s process and power generation category.
Two out of the three finalists’ submissions in the process and power generation category were metallurgy projects that sought to cut carbon emissions. “The third finalist related to development of an offshore wind farm and the very important renewable energy integration that [the implementation] was fulfilling,” explained Biagi at the Year in Infrastructure 2024 Going Digital Awards (Oct. 9-10) in Vancouver, Canada.
The Bozhong Offshore Wind Farm was the 2024 category winner and is the first grid-parity offshore wind farm project located in China’s Shandong province. Pioneering the intersection of submarine cables and oil and gas pipelines, the project presented complex hydrological and geological site conditions that required cost-efficient design solutions. Their project team leaned on Bentley for developing a full lifecycle digital twin and for achieving digital and intelligent construction control, facility operations and maintenance. Upon completion, the facility will provide 1.698 billion kilowatt-hours of clean electricity to the grid annually, reducing carbon emissions by 1.26 million tons.
What Digital Transformation Means Today
The digitalization of industrial value-added processes and its penetration across industries dates back at least half a century. That’s when CAD (computer-aided drafting, or computer-aided design) entered the fray to streamline design, notably by replacing the drawing board with the computer screen. Today, vendors such as Autodesk, Bentley Systems, Dassault Systèmes, PTC and Siemens are the go-to software providers for supporting, speeding up and improving digital asset lifecycle management.
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Those initial solutions, said Biagi, have “evolved into supporting different engineering and design disciplines, bringing together structural engineering and important analysis roles, hydrology and so on, and enabling those disciplines to work together effectively in multidisciplinary design environments.”
Biagi noted that many disciplines remain locked into their own silos and ways of thinking. In this respect, he said, Bentley excels at leveraging digital models from the design phase to drive better asset performance, reliability and asset integrity. “There are so many opportunities if we bring those disciplines together and are able to see in context the engineering models and the data they generate,” Biagi said. “It allows new levels of insight, new levels of analysis.”
And while digital transformation is the endgame, achieving this goal involves going digital through a progression of implementations. “From the earliest stages of generating data-centric models to fulfilling open ecosystems, these environments allow the data to be used in so many ways that were never originally imagined,” he said.
Pioneering Open Data Ecosystems
Developing an open-source schema specifically for infrastructure is another cornerstone in Bentley’s strategic digitalization play. Open-source business models revolve around an idea that more users mean more engagement, which means more user categories and more revenue opportunities. Bentley espouses the view that infrastructure organizations need open ecosystems that enable integration and interoperability across tools and platforms.
The internal challenge, according to Biagi, has been to have a diverse set of software covering a range of disciplines. Bentley’s iTwin platform, for instance, was borne from an internal need to have software that communicates between the disciplines, he said. The platform provides APIs and services to help developers build digital twins for infrastructure assets (through developer.bentley.com) and handles back-end tasks such as security, infrastructure and data integration.
Bentley’s approach to open access in engineering virtualizes multiple data sources and provides a unified view without copying the raw data. Biagi maintained that data shouldn’t be locked into proprietary formats; rather, it should be federated and brought together with other sources of information, which facilitate insights and the ability to be fully aware of everything that surrounds facilities. Moreover, data should be shared securely.
Simplifying Embodied Carbon Reporting with Added 3D Visualizations
A central message evangelized in Bentley CEO Nicholas Cumins’ keynote presentation encapsulates this thinking: “The secure flow of data is necessary to solve global infrastructure challenges, including the expansion of energy grids, modernization of transportation systems and retrofitting of existing assets to meet sustainable development goals.”
This year, Bentley Systems solidified its investment in tools that simplify carbon reporting with the announcement of new Carbon Analysis capabilities in iTwin Experience (the company’s version of a single pane for visualizing, analyzing, managing and sharing infrastructure digital twins). The carbon analysis tool features continuous reporting and carbon visualization functionality to allow engineers to streamline carbon calculations during the design process.
READ MORE: Putting the Digital Twin to Work
“Embodied carbon” is the carbon footprint of an asset before it is built, encompassing the greenhouse gases emitted during the construction process. The International Coalition for Sustainable Infrastructure (ICSI) estimates that embodied carbon from new infrastructure will be responsible for half of the world’s carbon footprint released between now and 2050.
Taking it One Step Further With AI
Using Bentley’s carbon analysis means engineers can make “cradle-to-gate” assessments on a design’s carbon footprint from the moment raw materials are extracted until it leaves the factory’s gate, according to Biagi.
This year, Bentley Systems also delivered OpenSite+, the first engineering application leveraging generative AI for civil site design. The digital twin-native product integrates with Bentley’s iTwin platform. Since it is built on large language models, users have instant AI-powered capabilities when they create, revise and interact with requirements documentation and 3D site models. In addition, the copilot handles layout optimization and automates drawing production in a fraction of time compared to traditional CAD software.
The integration of AI and machine learning for proactive asset management effectively ensures the company’s acceleration to the next phase in digitally transforming critical infrastructure asset management.
According to Biagi, copilots for site design users bring together different sources of data. “With a few key prompts, it’s able to generate scenarios, it’s able to generate layouts and suggest context that can then be evaluated against lots of different other criteria—cost, carbon accounting, the land, remediation and so many other different disciplines,” he said. “What it’s allowing is for engineers to be able to evaluate concepts so much faster and to be able to get to a stage of a very mature design very, very quickly.”
Editor’s Note: Rehana Begg served as a juror in Bentley Systems Year in Infrastructure 2024 Going Digital Awards.
Editor’s Note: Machine Design’s WISE (Workers in Science and Engineering) hub compiles our coverage of workplace issues affecting the engineering field, in addition to contributions from equity seeking groups and subject matter experts within various subdisciplines.
