Bentley Systems Announces Support of IFC for Digital Twins

buildingSMART International is delighted to welcome Bentley Systems to the community. Bentley Systems, Incorporated is the leading global provider of comprehensive software and digital twin cloud services for advancing the design, construction, and operations of infrastructure. Bentley Systems joins as a multinational member bringing a wealth of knowledge and expertise to the standards and solutions program.

At the same time, Bentley announced the availability of iModel Bridge for IFC, a generic IFC bridge that enables Bentley’s iModels to consume IFC geometry and business data. iModels are specialized containers for infrastructure information that are at the heart of Bentley’s digital twins strategy for infrastructure engineering. iTwin Services now enable iModels to export snapshots in IFC and treat IFC datasets as an input source, aligning their content for use by Bentley’s design applications. Earlier this year, Bentley announced the availability on GitHub of version 1.0 of iModel.js, an open source platform for digital twins (see imodeljs.org).

Bhupinder Singh, Bentley’s chief product officer, said: “Bentley is committed to supporting the best implementation of IFC for digital twins. We are committed to openness, and in fact we’re making plans to open source iModel Bridge for IFC. The combination of IFC support and open source principles should give the community confidence that they can create and curate digital twins without being boxed in by dark data.”

Richard Petrie, CEO, buildingSMART International said, “I am delighted that Bentley has joined buildingSMART International. As one of the major software vendors in our field, Bentley plays a critical role in our community. The vision Bentley has for iModels and open source offers the IFC community exciting new possibilities for open interoperable ways of working with digital twins.”