May 3, 2018 – Bentley Systems announced the acquisition of Plaxis , a provider of geotechnical software, based in Delft, Netherlands, and the agreement to acquire soil engineering software provider SoilVision , based in Saskatchewan, Canada. The acquisitions, with Bentley’s reporting and data management software gINT, serve to make Bentley a source for geotechnical professionals “going digital.”
Projects necessarily begin with geotechnical surveys and sampling, captured with gINT for versatile documentation and reporting. Next, professionals perform engineering related to soil properties, soil behavior, and groundwater flow using SoilVision’s SVOFFICE applications, supplemented by Plaxis’ offerings. Then soil-structure interaction is analyzed through Plaxis ’ design, simulation, and engineering software (e.g. PLAXIS 2D, PLAXIS 3D).
The opportunity, by way of digital workflows enabled through Bentley’s modeling environment, is for geotechnical applications to be integrated with Bentley’s structural applications (such as STAAD, RAM, and SACS) for geo-structural engineering performance. As changes may occur in owner requirements, structural strategies, or site conditions (continuously surveyed through UAVs and Bentley’s ContextCapture for reality modeling), geotechnical analysis could be continuously applied for improved outcomes, as managed through ProjectWise collaboration services.
For today’s infrastructure demands, geotechnical considerations are coming to the fore. Urbanization, for instance, drives growth both vertically and underground, with emphasis on the capacity of foundations and tunnels. And new infrastructure projects of every type depend upon constructed dams, embankments, dikes, levees, and reservoirs to improve their resilience. Moreover, new asset types such as offshore wind turbine structures require new geotechnical analysis capabilities, in this case to be accomplished with Plaxis’ forthcoming MoDeTo software.
Because infrastructure assets are crucially linked to subsurface environs, they are vulnerable to geo-environmental risks including seismic activity, subsidence, and weather impacts. Leveraging new digital workflows which incorporate real-time monitoring and analytics during infrastructure operations, geotechnical professionals can play the increasingly valuable role they deserve in achieving geo-environmental resilience.
