Bentley Systems, the infrastructure engineering software company, has announced the availability of integrated workflows for lifecycle assessment (LCA) and embodied carbon calculation capabilities in the Bentley iTwin platform to support the sustainable-development goals of infrastructure projects.
This integration is a result of Bentley’s collaboration with One Click LCA Ltd, the world’s leading construction sector lifecycle assessment and environmental product declaration software. The software can be used for buildings, infrastructure, renovations, construction products and materials, and portfolios. The One Click LCA platform is used in over 100 countries by manufacturers, consultants, designers, contractors, and investors to decarbonize the entire construction value chain.
The partnership is a natural step in Bentley’s strategy for empowering its users to achieve sustainable development goals (SDGs), particularly addressing climate action and decarbonizing infrastructure. Infrastructure digital twin solutions will be an essential enabler and accelerator of carbon transparency and disclosure use cases, and the adoption of digital twin solutions will help accelerate the transformation of infrastructure performance.
With this integration, Bentley’s infrastructure digital twin solutions powered by iTwin, and third-party applications built on the Bentley iTwin platform can unlock infrastructure lifecycle assessment workflows. The Bentley iTwin platform is an open, scalable, platform-as-a-service offering enabling an ecosystem of developers to create and bring to market solutions that solve real infrastructure problems by leveraging digital twins.
Kaustubh Page, director of product management, Bentley iTwin platform, said: “We are excited to see developers in the Bentley iTwin platform ecosystem tackling sustainability and carbon reduction challenges. Tracking the environmental impact of an infrastructure project involves a constant stream of design changes coming from various engineering disciplines. By unifying these data streams, users can quickly create a quantity takeoff report at the right aggregation level required for LCA calculations while reducing the lifecycle assessment workflow from weeks to hours. We are excited to see engineering firms build fully automated lifecycle assessment workflows for their infrastructure projects.”
Designers and sustainability engineers spend a significant amount of time assessing or reporting on the environmental footprint of infrastructure projects. With multiple design tools used in these projects, a typical lifecycle analysis can be time consuming, especially when manually exporting and aggregating data from bills of quantity and bills of material. It can also be error-prone, requiring additional verification of successful ingestion by LCA tools.
The One Click LCA integration creates time savings and improves accuracy. Users can incorporate engineering data created by diverse design tools into a single view using the Bentley iTwin platform, generate a unified report of materials and quantities and share it with One Click LCA via cloud synchronization. This integration gives users the ability to analyze environmental footprints, accelerate environmental reporting, perform project optioneering, and optimize the selection of materials and products.
Rodrigo Fernandes, director ES(D)G (empowering sustainable development goals), said: “Infrastructure engineers are at the forefront of disrupting climate change. And our collective conscious is that climate change and its effects won’t be solved without strong collaboration and ecosystem partnerships. One Click LCA can actively contribute by helping our users accelerate their low-carbon pathways—adopting low-carbon materials and products, minimizing resource consumption, and optimizing structural design—in every type of infrastructure, not just vertical infrastructure.”
With the ability to integrate lifecycle assessment workflows with the Bentley iTwin platform, users will be empowered with new opportunities for environmental intelligence around embodied carbon and environmental footprints of linear infrastructure projects.
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