The 2008 Applied Research Seminar was held on May 27, 2008 in conjunction with Bentley's Be Conference in Baltimore, MD.

OVERVIEW

The mission of Bentley Systems has long focused on helping our users improve the world's infrastructure. In general terms, infrastructure provides the basic facilities, services, and installations required for a community or society to function. In many ways, infrastructure is in fact the interface between people and the planet. For society to advance much beyond a very basic agrarian lifestyle requires infrastructure. Nearly all of our day-to-day interaction with the environment is mediated in some way by services provided by infrastructure.

The theme for the 2008 BE Conference is "Best Practices for Sustaining Infrastructure."  By "sustaining infrastructure," Bentley means the role of infrastructure in creating a sustainable world; how our users are meeting these challenges today; and how they can better address the challenges in the future. In terms of sustaining the planet, there are many critical issues surrounding the world's infrastructure, including CO2 emissions, climate change, the availability of clean water and sanitation, chronic hunger, unsafe bridges, earthquakes, severe weather, terrorist attacks, civil wars, coastal flooding, hazardous waste, and depletion of nonrenewable resources. The world's infrastructure - as well as the professionals around the world who design, build and operate the world's infrastructure assets - will play a fundamentally important role in successfully addressing them.

This theme - Sustaining Infrastructure - extends to Bentley's 2008 Applied Research Seminar in conjunction with the 2008 BE Conference.  This seminar will focus on three primary topics:

• Computational Design: Understanding and quantifying the performance of an infrastructure asset early in the design process can result in infrastructure assets that are more sustainable. One strategy for achieving this is through integrating performance - energy, efficiency, safety, etc. - into the conceptual design process to enable a more holistic approach to asset design. This is the essence of computational design.
• Water Loss: Clean water is a fundamental resource critical to the sustainability of any society. Unfortunately, it's becoming more and more scarce. Even today, over one billion people do not have access to clean drinking water. Water loss is a significant issue around the world due to inadequate or aging water systems. Anything we, as infrastructure professionals, can do to address the issue of water loss contributes directly to global sustainability.
• Construction: Anything we can do as an industry within the Design-Build-Operate life-cycle to improve efficiencies, productivity, schedule, etc. allows us to realize a greater return on sustainability investments. The level of automation in design is very high (it's "broadband"), the level of automation is increasing (it's becoming "broadband") but there's more we can do. However, the hand-off of information from design to construction is still a very manual and "lossy" activity, requiring lots of manipulation, augmentation, and often re-creation of the design data within construction (it's "dial-up" at best). The focus will be on more effective use of design information in the field and better ways to hand off information from design to construction which can have a significant, direct, and immediate impact on the ROI of our investments in sustainability through infrastructure.

The presenters will include industry professionals, academic researchers, and members of the Bentley Applied Research staff.  The Applied Research Seminar will include a keynote presentation on the theme of Sustaining Infrastructure as well as a panel discussion among the various presenters.

The individual sessions are listed below.  The full presentation can be downloaded for a number of the speakers by using the link following the session description.

1	Welcome & Introductory Remarks Buddy Cleveland, Sr. Vice President, Applied Research, Bentley Systems, Inc. Click here to download the Welcome presentation.
2	Keynote Presentation: Sustainable Businesses Dr. Sarah Slaughter, MIT Sloan School of Management  Click here to download Dr. Slaughter's presentation.
3	Computational Design - Opening Remarks Volker Mueller, Bentley Systems, Inc. Computational Design is a very broad area and may include any design activity supported by computing devices. Because the research area is intentionally not well-bound, focus topics for Bentley Systems' computational design research have been identified and will be described in this session. These focus topics will change over time as some of the research will find its way into programs or program features and of course primarily because anticipated industry needs will change. This introduction outlines Bentley Systems' main research activities in computational design as well as suggest major research trajectories and briefly discuss the reasoning behind these selections. It will introduce the dominant theme for the following presentations about two of the current research efforts which both deal with design feedback in early design stages with considerable focus on sustainability.  Click here to download Volker's presentation.
4	Generative Components and ECOTECT Integration Kaustav Biswas, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA There is agreement that concerns about the amount of energy use of buildings need to be addressed as early as possible in design.  One tool that has gained acceptance for early design exploration of energy issues is ECOTECT.  This session describes a prototype implementation of integration between Bentley's GenerativeComponents and the ECOTECT application.
5	Water Main Break Forecasting and its Impact on Water Loss Reduction Yehuda Kleiner, National Research Council, Canada Pipe break or burst causes large amount of water losses. Actively replacing and improving aged water pipelines is one of the key strategies to prevent pipe bursts and thus reduce potential water loss. This presentation will discuss various models to forecast water main breaks and the contributing factors to breakage frequency. The predicted water mains serve as capital improvement candidates to be rehabilitated to improve the system integrity. A conceptual framework will also be presented to asses how the successful application of these models might impact on water loss.
6	Spotting Critical Sectors in a Water Distribution Network Using Soil Resistivity Cristian Sipos, University of McGill, Canada This research is aimed at predicting the probable critical sectors, which can lead to leaking spots in a network, based on the analysis of soil resistivity data collected at McGill Downtown Campus. Although water leaks can be identified reasonably accurately through other methods, resistivity test is highly recommended when developing an inventory along with the condition assessment of underground facilities in a given area. This test has been already undertaken at McGill, as part of a larger project, aimed at developing a GIS- inventory and condition assessment of the underground services on the Downtown Campus. The results will be used to pinpoint probable critical sectors which may experience water leakage, presently or in the near future, without performing any other conventional tests for leak detection.
7	Optimization Modeling for Leakage Detection in Water Distribution Systems Zheng Yi Wu, Bentley Systems, Inc. USA Leakage is a big portion of water loss, leakage detection is of great interest and significance to water utilities, but no systematic modeling approach is developed for practical engineers to effectively undertaking the leakage detection task with real data. This talk will present you the latest Bentley innovation of leakage detection optimization modeling technology that is developed within the same solution framework as the model calibration tool Darwin Calibrator. It allows you to take advantage of the common optimization algorithm and objective functions, enables engineers to flexibly undertake leakage detection as an independent task or the combined task with model calibration. A number of practical examples will be presented to illustrate the effectiveness of the extended Darwin Calibrator for leakage detection.  Click here to download Dr. Wu's presentation.
8	Introduction of Research Activities in Construction and Work Packaging Dean Bowman & Mark Smith, Bentley Systems, Inc. USA This session will provide an overview as to the discipline breadth (e.g., multiple industries including plant, civil and building), lifecycle breadth (from planning to work packaging to field measurement to construction management invoicing to feeding data into operations & maintenance) as well as the depth (e.g., change management in the work package context) of activities Bentley's Applied Research Group is currently engaged in.   The following presentations are introduced and positioned.  Click here to download Dean and Mark's presentation.
9	Developments in Nuclear Plant Construction Kenji Araki, Hitachi Research Laboratory, Japan This presentation will provide an overview of the joint activities by Hitachi and Bentley in the area of advanced construction management for nuclear construction.  This will include a review the wide scope of Hitachi requirements and how, together, both companies have successfully mapped Bentley technologies to form solution prototypes.
10	Virtual Construction Environment (VCE) framework for the Construction Planning Process Dr. Walid Thabet, Virginia Polytechnic University, USA This presentation reviews ongoing research to develop a graphical and analytical framework for performing different work execution planning scenarios. Using a predefined 3D project model, monolithic cad objects (defining the majority of these models developed and used by the A/E/C today) are first transformed into a more granular form to correspond with work tasks. Various tools then optimize the centric and interdependent construction planning factors of work quantity, duration and resources. A prototype implementation is presented to demonstrate concepts proposed.
11	Change Management Moderator: Igal Kaptsan, Bentley Systems, Inc. This will be a highly interactive session on the topic of change management moderated by Igal Kaptsan of Bentley's Applied Research Group. Bentley has recently acquired new technology which has the potential to significantly enhance the change management capabilities within Bentley products. The intent of this session is to initiate the critically important process to develop deeper insights into the requirements users have in the area of change management. Our objective of this session is to listen. We will demonstrate the basic capabilities and potential for the newly acquired technology but we won't be promoting product. We are most interested to get your input as to the priorities and focus for integrating this technology into Bentley products. Click here to download Igal's presentation.