Leading providers of BIM technology for engineers and contractors, Bentley Systems and Trimble are pooling their capabilities and resources to leverage construction modelling for the benefit of capital, industrial, and infrastructure project delivery.

Construction modelling encompasses modelling 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 modelling deliverables.

BIM toolsets supporting optioneering and analytical modelling are used by architects and engineers to perform design modelling, enabling owners to make better decisions for better-performing assets, including in respects that would be pertinent and valuable during operations and maintenance. However, when some of the most advanced BIM deliverables are not able to meet constructors’ requirements, the constructors are left to create their own discrete 3D models for the limited purposes of construction visualisation.

Consequently, 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, negating the potential benefits of BIM for better-performing projects or assets.

Aiming to fill this gap by enabling all the potential benefits of construction modelling, Bentley and Trimble will pool their 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; and joining forces to advance standards; leveraging in certain cases common modelling software for virtual and physical alignment.

Construction modelling advances resulting from the Bentley and Trimble collaboration have realised several benefits for clients including 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.

Users are able to save time, reduce rework, preserve design intent, and accelerate project delivery via the seamless transfer of information from concept through construction, thanks to 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.

Contractors also have high 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, the Bentley-Trimble integration enables 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.

Bryn Fosburgh, vice president, responsible for Trimble’s Construction Technology Divisions, said that the construction modelling collaboration is helping their users working together on projects, to get the most advantage of constructible models.

Harry Vitelli, Bentley Systems vice president, construction and field adds that 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 ProjectWise CONNECT Edition and Trimble’s Trimble Connect platform, both announced recently.