Bentley Systems and Trimble have committed to leveraging construction modeling for the benefit of capital, industrial, and infrastructure project delivery. Aspects of construction modeling include modeling of temporary works, intelligent positioning, “splitting and sequencing,” detailing for fabrication, workface planning, construction work packaging, and support for distributed construction – referencing and supplementing design modeling deliverables.
Today, architects and engineers perform design modeling with BIM toolsets that support optioneering and analytical modeling, and enable owners to make better decisions for better-performing assets, including in respects that would be pertinent and valuable during operations and maintenance. However, some of the most advanced BIM deliverables have simply not been useful for constructors’ requirements. Accordingly, the constructors have been left to create their own discrete 3D models for the limited purposes of construction visualization. As a result, owners have been unable to expect their designers’ BIM work to even survive the construction process let alone provide visibility into the engineering and analytics, which otherwise could have been useful during operations. In practice, therefore, this discontinuity has negated the potential benefits of BIM for either better-performing projects or assets. Construction modeling is the response by Bentley and Trimble to fill this gap and to enable all the potential benefits. In construction modeling the architects’ and engineers’ work is preserved and referenced, with construction modeling overlaid and as-built changes included.
Bentley and Trimble will each contribute to construction modeling advances by pooling resources for product development through:
- sharing schemas across design and construction applications to ensure that constructible models maintain semantic fidelity;
- leveraging i-models for construction deliverables to and from the companies’ respective software and hardware, when used together in project delivery;
- joining forces to advance standards, for instance the Open Geospatial Consortium’s “intrinsic geo-context” down to construction levels of detail;
- leveraging in certain cases common modeling software for virtual and physical alignment; for instance, Trimble uses Bentley software technology to provide intrinsic 3D geo-context for Trimble® Field Link.
Benefits realized thus far from Bentley and Trimble construction modeling advances include:
- facilitating accurate information mobility between vertical building, plant design, and the construction site by enabling engineers to create intelligent field data in Bentley Navigator, manage those point sets in ProjectWise, and securely deliver them to Trimble Field Solutions via Trimble Field Link, creating high fidelity positioning points between the construction model in the design office and positioning devices in the field.
- saving time, reducing rework, preserving design intent, and accelerating project delivery via the seamless transfer of information from concept through construction. This results from the new link between the Trimble Quantm® Alignment Planning System and OpenRoads, which extends the detailed design-to-construction workflow for heavy civil alignment to encompass the corridor planning and value engineering processes, complete with change management and tracking.
- providing contractors the greatest flexibility in performing field layout tasks and enabling the construction of higher-quality buildings by accepting Bentley’s i-models in Trimble Field Link to enhance information mobility.
- responding to the “Every Day Counts” challenge of the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Federal Highway Administration by enabling terrain and alignment to be taken directly from Bentley’s OpenRoads technology for multi-discipline civil engineering into Trimble’s Business Center – HCE office software and then sent directly to its Site Positioning Systems and Grade Control Systems – information mobility “from BIM to bulldozer.”
Andy Kayhanfar, director of Virtual Construction, Kiewit, said, “One of the challenges we face in construction is translating design models into meaningful construction models for survey utilization in the field. Bentley and Trimble have provided a solution that helps drive greater efficiencies and reduces rework and risk when translating the design model to the survey. The Bentley-Trimble integration helps us better deliver the information created during the design process in OpenRoads to the project survey team through Trimble’s Business Center - HCE. With a greater amount of information passing through, the field has more confidence in the model, while the risks that come with multiple translations are significantly reduced.”
Bryn Fosburgh, vice president responsible for Trimble’s Construction Technology Divisions, said, “We are now really hitting our stride working with Bentley so that our mutual construction modeling activities help our users, working together on projects, to get the most advantage of constructible models. We see a great many ways to transform workflows so that BIM’s lifecycle benefits can be achieved.”
Harry Vitelli, Bentley Systems vice president, construction and field, said, “Bentley’s ongoing collaboration with Trimble is delivering real-world solutions that will transform the design to construction workflow – for example, by enabling greatly enhanced information mobility through Bentley’s recently announced ProjectWise CONNECT Edition and Trimble’s recently announced Trimble Connect platform. Both of our companies share the belief that construction modeling will offer new levels of construction data visibility. We also share a commitment to the provision of advancements in design-to-construction workflows that bring new value to our users in the project delivery space.”
