Atos and Bentley Systems team up to create and operate infrastructure digital twins

Global leaders in digital transformation, Atos, and leading infrastructure software solutions provider Bentley Systems have announced a strategic partnership through which they will offer a complete solution to create and operate digital twins on behalf of industry and infrastructure asset owners. 

Digital twins refers to a digital replica of physical assets, processes, people, places, systems and devices that can be used for various purposes and is particularly relevant to the infrastructure sector. Atos’ global experience and expertise in digital transformation together with Bentley’s infrastructure, engineering, reality modelling and asset performance software portfolio will enable businesses to take advantage of fully-integrated and managed digital twins as a cloud-based service. 

Bentley say the new offering will support owner-operators meet their business KPIs through the following features and benefits:

• Full immersive visibility of assets, with up-to-date 3D models of assets via drone-enabled scans 
• Real-time monitoring, to predict asset performance and avoid failures 
• Performance analysis, to maximise asset availability, increase productivity, ensure optimum performance and ultimately extend life of asset in field
• Remote operation of assets, in the case of dangerous or inaccessible assets
• Operational training (for immersive VR environments)
• Support for decision making on asset operational strategies

Markus Schaffhauser, Atos global business and platform solutions CTO, said, “We have been impressed at the capabilities of Bentley’s software and how well it meshes with our expertise in digital transformation, to now deliver innovative services for industrial and infrastructure asset owners. The Atos-Bentley partnership has gotten off to a fast start, and I am convinced that our digital twin services will be of tremendous value to owners.”

CEO of Bentley Systems, Greg Bentley, said, “I believe that our collaboration with Atos can help owner-operators to really jump-start their ‘going digital’ ambitions, enabling and taking advantage of both immersive visualisation and analytical visibility. Atos’ vast expertise in digital data integration, along with their global reach, make them the ideal partner for digital twin cloud services.” 

Bentley and Atos have previously worked together on several manufacturing client projects, which brought together Atos’ expertise in system integration and data capture and analytics with Bentley’s reality modelling software.

The new partnership was initiated through the Atos and Siemens Global Strategic Alliance, which maximises the combined strength of Siemens’ products and solutions with Atos’ experience and expertise in enabling IT services to support their digital transformation, notably in the field of ‘internet of things’ services, artificial intelligence and cybersecurity. 

In 2016, Bentley Systems also entered into a Strategic Alliance with Siemens to enlarge their respective offerings for infrastructure and industry to the benefit of end users. Since that time, Bentley and Siemens have jointly invested in the development of new solutions including for digitalisation of discrete and process manufacturing, power transmission and distribution, railway engineering, and power generation.