New capabilities, currently in preview, to unlock carbon data management for infrastructure projects
Bentley Systems has announced new capabilities for carbon assessment in iTwin Experience, its cloud product for visualising and navigating ‘digital twins’.
Infrastructure professionals can now ‘fully automate’ embodied carbon calculation reports and impact analyses without the need to develop proprietary iTwin-powered apps.
In 2022, Bentley developed an integration service in the iTwin Platform to automate the process of generating embodied carbon reports for infrastructure projects via One Click LCA and EC3.
With this workflow, reports are initiated using the iTwin Platform and then viewed in One Click LCA or EC3.
Now, iTwin Experience provides a bi-directional integration with EC3, enabling carbon assessments to be visualized within a digital twin.
iTwin Experience exports a data model to EC3, a free tool that performs the embodied carbon calculations and returns results that iTwin Experience ‘seamlessly reads and visualises’.
The capabilities also unlock the integration of carbon assessment workflows with other Bentley products and solutions for designing and managing infrastructure projects.
“Lifecycle assessments, environmental footprint analyses, and reports are becoming standard requirements for infrastructure projects worldwide,” said Kaustubh Page, director of product management with Bentley Systems. “Designers and environmental engineers spend critical time generating environmental assessments or reports. Because the required data needed to be manually exported from multiple design authoring tools and then aggregated and verified, generating these environmental assessments has been a time-consuming and potentially error-prone process.
“With these new capabilities built into iTwin Experience, it is feasible to transform what is typically a six-month process into a six-minute workflow. Our goal is for iTwin Experience users to spend their valuable time on designing, optimising, and making better decisions, faster – not exporting, aggregating, and validating data.”
“We want to enable users to implement carbon analysis and optimization as a natural, repeatable, and standardized procedure, as part of managing every type of infrastructure project, anywhere in the world,” added Rodrigo Fernandes, Director of ES(D)G with Bentley Systems.
“The sooner that carbon assessment is integrated into an infrastructure project, the bigger the carbon reduction opportunities will be. This announcement is focused on embodied carbon, particularly relevant in the early project stages, but iTwin Experience unleashes opportunities for telling the whole ‘carbon story’ of an infrastructure project and asset. We are genuinely unlocking environmental footprint assessments powered by infrastructure digital twins.”
