Digital Partnership Speeds Growth

In the context of ageing infrastructure assets in the developed world, inspections play a critical role in ensuring safety, extending the life of the asset, and increasing its performance. About a year ago a partnership was initiated between Bentley Systems and Bureau Veritas to offer clients around the world cutting-edge technology for smarter inspections based on asset/reality modeling. In this partnership, TIC (testing, inspection, and certification) and engineering services capitalize on BIM (building information modeling) innovations in terms of continuous surveying and context modeling. They call this “inspectioneering.” The software leverages the Internet of Things, connected mobile devices, and cloud services to produce a hybrid digital model that can be used as a frame of reference for an intelligent analysis of inspection data as well as for compliance evaluation.

In the future, Bureau Veritas’ “digital inspectors” will be equipped with sensors, smart cameras, and drones. Through reality modeling, reality meshes representing continuously surveyed conditions can be accumulatively compared, and cloud services can make the field observations immediately and immersively accessible to the right Bureau Veritas experts, at any time and place. The model is ready to be used by engineers for evaluation, diagnosis, and remediation of risks. All this was discussed at Bentley’s Year in Infrastructure Conference hosted in Singapore from October 10-12.

The strategic Alliance Panel at the conference discussed the impact of digitalization on industrial growth and how partners are complementing the digital effort. “Partnerships are about delivering collaboration,” said the moderator. Jacques Lubetzki Executive Vice President, Bureau Veritas Europe said it is about creating trust among stakeholders by assessing the conformity of assets and products. Earlier, the processes were manually done – writing notes etc; but now employees have to adapt to new technologies. As a neutral third-party BV can play the role of the digital operator to ensure data integrity is maintained. The business case for digitalization, he opined is improved quality, efficiency, and safety. The digital model is a fantastic tool to share information with all stakeholders and will help to reach the next generation of asset integrity management.

Greg Bentley, CEO of Bentley Systems, said that advancing both cloud services and related inspections opens up great perspectives for their users and clients. By leveraging digital engineering models in their continuously surveyed context, Bentley can achieve asset performance modeling and provide decision support to improve the safety, and increase the productivity, reliability, and longevity of those assets. Together, Bentley and Bureau Veritas believe that their work together will be a significant contribution to engineers and asset owners, in going digital.

The conference provided an opportunity for Bureau Veritas to detail these new services through the following presentations:

The Future of Inspectioneering

This presentation described how Bureau Veritas, with the support of Bentley applications, provides a new type of "inspectioneering" that crosses inspection data with regulatory and external data sources to identify defects and recommend optimal inspection and maintenance schedules.

The focus was on how inspection services are transformed by combining cutting-edge technologies: IoT, robotics (including drones), predictive analytics, and digital modeling. These technologies enable inspections based on anticipated risk, rather than time intervals that provide benefits for all the stakeholders working on the asset. In fact, the technologies help avoid unplanned asset downtime, improve safety and compliance, while delivering new and valuable insights to increase operational efficiency.

Technology Strategic to Achieving Cost Effective Mechanical Integrity and Reliability at Hindustan Petroleum Corporation, Ltd. (HPCL)

Protecting the health and safety of citizens, as well as the environment, is a critical concern to any project team. Often, achieving these priorities begins with reducing technical failure risk. In this session, Bureau Veritas explained how, by partnering with Bentley, it has established a new model that combines high service reliability and integrity management with operational efficiency and effectiveness, for Hindustan Petroleum Corporation, Ltd (HPCL).