Leveraging digital twin technology, the Sydney Airport Project streamlined the time to access important information that improved on-site safety.
Overview
Building a major airport is like building a small city. With a complex infrastructure that’s constantly being worked on, the challenge is seamlessly fitting all the pieces together. This is what was facing the Sydney Airport project team. They were looking for a way to align all internal and external stakeholders in a cloud environment to improve workflows, as well as health and safety. Using Bentley’s OpenCities 365 product portfolio and delivering a digital twin solution helped the Sydney Airport team gain back up to 20% of their working time and improve project safety procedures overall.
Challenge
On a typical airport project, an individual could spend between 15% and 20% of their working time searching for necessary data and information to complete a task. This percentage only increases for contractors or teams that require cross-departmental collaboration. Often, the tasks that needed to be completed had important safety considerations that required the ability to quickly access information. Time spent ensuring that all safety considerations were in place had the potential to cut into project time, further slowing down the project.
Solution
To address these types of challenges, the Sydney Airport team adopted the OpenCities 365. The configured solution, which they called “Maps@SYD” empowered all project stakeholders to navigate around the digitalized airport and easily find data and information specific to their department and role.
The OpenCities digital twin provided the perfect, easy-to-use safety readiness tool for all project stakeholders. The project team discovered that as they built the digital twin in real time, they were also building a safety system for workers. The data that was collected, stored, and updated regularly helped ensure the latest project site information was easily available.
Success
Using the easy-to-navigate OpenCities digital twin as a scalable, single source of truth virtually eliminated time spent searching for data – giving all project stakeholders up to 20% of their working time back.
Streamlining access to data with OpenCities 365 improved project readiness, a key component to project site safety. With the OpenCities digital twin solution in place, teams started easily identifying and storing equipment location information while maintaining important and easy-to-find measurements. This stored data helped teammates prepare for site visits with the right equipment, improving safety procedures. Using the digital twin data information to better plan site visits led to safer conditions and proved to be a win for all stakeholders.
“Labor unions have recognized [the benefits] from a safety perspective. They don’t want their workers hurt. Unions and companies have recognized the benefits of how much faster the construction goes, how much safer it is, and how much better the quality is going into the work.” – Brian
