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How AI and digital twins have helped five European cities make their infrastructure more sustainable.
Two years ago, poor rainfall, premature snowmelt, rising temperatures and other climate change-related factors led to Italy’s worst drought in seven decades. The water level of the Po River, the country’s longest and fastest-flowing waterway, dropped eight feet below its average. The arid conditions exposed the Po’s white, sandy bottom and prevented irrigation in the Po Valley, the breadbasket of northern Italy, which supplies 40 percent of the country’s food, including rice, corn, tomatoes and Parmesan cheese. And water shortages extend beyond farming and the food supply. Towns in the Po Valley, located in one of Italy’s richest regions, had to ration water.
Unfortunately, the drought was not a random incident. “Climate model projections for Europe indicate that meteorological droughts, due to lack of precipitation, will become increasingly frequent and severe, especially in the second half of the 21st century,” wrote the researchers who studied the event in a paper published in the journal Science.
The gravity of the situation is not lost on UK and EU leaders. At the end of June, the British capital hosted the London Climate Action Week. The event, part of the UN’s Race to Resilience campaign, hosted more than 300 in-person and virtual meetings, including an event at Bentley’s UK headquarters, with the aim of boosting the debate on sustainability and global solutions to climate change.
In late May, water resilience was the theme of the EU Green Week, a conference held mainly in Brussels. In May, the European Environment Agency (EEA) also published its first European Climate Risk Assessment (EUCRA) report, as part of the European Union’s strategy on adaptation to climate change. The report noted that prolonged droughts cause major economic damage and can severely degrade water resources, and that extreme rainfall and flooding have increased in large parts of Europe. “The trend is expected to increase further with climate warming,” the researchers said.
One solution that can help countries make their infrastructure more sustainable and prepare for global warming is digital twins. Infrastructure digital twins are virtual representations of roads, power grids, water and sewer systems, buildings, and even cities. By incorporating real-time data into digital models, infrastructure digital twins provide city leaders and other users with a complete and accurate representation of their assets and systems.
Bentley Systems, an infrastructure engineering software company, has been developing digital twin technology that enables users around the world to design, assemble and operate their infrastructure assets, making them more sustainable and resilient. “We need to be incredibly efficient and holistic in what we do and how we address these water management challenges,” said Thomas Krom, director of the environmental segment at Seequent, Bentley’s subsurface business. Krom said the adoption of open digital standards will promote interoperability and interconnectivity across all vested interests.
In the UK, Seequent and Bentley Systems have provided software for projects such as High Speed 2 (HS2), a high-speed railway that will connect London to Birmingham, Manchester and the East Midlands by 2033. HS2 has a sustainable vision of zero-carbon rail travel. “The way we travel – and the way we build our transport networks – are central to our response to this global emergency,” HS2 states on its website.
Many users in the UK, EU and elsewhere around the world have already implemented digital twins to build, improve and operate their water systems. Here are some examples:
Updating London's Victorian-era sewer system
London’s 150-year-old sewer system put an end to the great stench that plagued the British capital in the mid-19th century. But today, with eight million people living in London, the system is in need of an upgrade. Costain, VINCI and Bachy Soletanche are working in a joint venture to design, build and replace the eastern section of the sewer system with a new super sewer called the Thames Tideway Tunnel project. Bentley’s digital twin and other solutions are part of that work, helping the project team visualize the entire construction process. Once complete, the new sewer system will mitigate wastewater pollution and significantly improve the water quality of the River Thames for the next 120 years.
Staying comfortable in Helsinki
Winters in Finland are often cold, long and dark – the locals counterbalance the white nights and spectacular midnight sunsets of late spring and early summer. Even in Helsinki, the capital, a cold snap can drop temperatures to -20 °C (-4 °F).
Most cities in the country use district heating systems that transmit heat from a central source through a network of insulated water pipes to apartment and office buildings. In fact, the country maintains more than 16,000 kilometers (10,000 miles) of district heating pipes and about 3,000 kilometers of water and sewer lines in Helsinki and the surrounding metropolitan area. Parts of these networks are aging, and Helsinki needed a better way to manage them.
Helsinki’s Environmental Services Authority, Silo AI, worked with Bentley Systems to build a digital twin of the heating system. This enabled the city’s pipeline operators to prioritize maintenance in areas where leaks are likely to occur. The utility network’s predictive maintenance system included multiple data sources, AI models, and a visual analytics user interface using Bentley’s iTwin platform.
Stopping the leaks in Greece
Water leaks in public systems are a plague for municipalities around the world. Greece, for example, lost about a quarter of its public water supply each year to leaks, according to a 2017 report by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).
As a result, Greek households consumed more drinking water than any other EU country at the time. To improve water and wastewater regulation in the northern Greek town of Kozani, local officials worked with DEYAK Water Utility and Bentley to build a digital water twin to map and analyze the water system, which supplies the town’s 60,000 residents. The digital twin allowed the team to quickly identify leaks and speed up repairs.
Improved leak management has reduced water waste. With 20 percent less water circulating through the network, Kozani residents can enjoy lower utility bills.
Around a water tower in Belgium
Many cities rely on water towers to store drinking water for their residents. The city of Liège, Belgium, is no exception. Its massive water tower, built in 1981, could hold 500 cubic meters of water (132,000 gallons). But it was aging, cracked, and needed repairs by the city. The most conventional way to inspect a water tower involved inspections by workers or manually studying photos taken by drones. But the owner, Société Wallonne des Eaux (SWDE), wanted to find a more efficient solution.
SWDE worked with Bentley to build a 3D digital model of the water tower and then use artificial intelligence, such as deep learning, to automate crack detection. SWDE sent a drone to capture 3,000 images, used them to create a “reality mesh” of the tower, and then activated the AI to find cracks. The scan revealed 1,704 cracks in the tower, nearly a third of which could not be detected by the human eye. The digital replicas helped SWDE determine how to prevent the water tower from degrading and accurately plan what renovation work was needed — and save money in the process.
There is no doubt that as climate change predictions become reality, our lives become less predictable and the infrastructure on which they depend more vulnerable. But technological revolutions such as AI and digital twins also allow us to spot the cracks in that infrastructure before they become worse, and develop truly thoughtful virtual solutions that allow us to blaze new trails in real life, with real confidence.
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