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PLAXIS Power Plays: Real-World Projects That Pushed the Limits of Geotechnical Engineering

You don’t thread a metro tunnel under a historic city or build foundations in earthquake zones by guessing what’s beneath your feet. In the world’s most ambitious or unique infrastructure projects, Bentley Systems’ PLAXIS software gives geotechnical teams the insights they need to build smarter. Here are six real-world projects where PLAXIS proved its value.  1. Triple Earthquake Simulation, Fukushima, Japan After the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami in Fukushima, one of the region’s rebuilding efforts involved a one-story factory constructed on silty ground. Takeuchi Construction had used a foundation system called the Tender Net Foundation (TNF), a shallow hybrid design combining grid-shaped soil improvement, a concrete slab, and individual footings. The foundation held up, even after the site was hit by an earthquake during construction and two more afterward. But was it because of design or luck? Engineers needed to know. The PLAXIS Effect Engineers typically had difficulty simulating the behavior of silty ground and the settlement behavior of the foundation following consecutive earthquakes. But using a PLAXIS 3D soil model and seismic records from nearby sensors, engineers simulated the TNF’s performance across all three earthquakes. The model not only matched the observed post-quake settlements, it confirmed

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The Case of the Missing Pump Energy Budget

In This Story Inefficient pumps silently steal from utility budgets  Data reveals clues that pumps won’t confess  Digital tools turn waste into savings  You lock your car and put your valuables in a safe to keep out thieves. But if you operate a water or wastewater system, you may have a thief in your organization silently stealing from you every day. I’m talking about the pumps in your pump stations. They look innocent enough, but a few of them are taking extra money out of your utility’s wallet each day and sending it off to the power company.  How do you find the culprit and put an end to this bleeding? We have some tips. Pumps and the systems they interact with are complicated, so there are many ways they could be wasting energy. The offending pump won’t tap you on the shoulder as you walk by and say, “Stop me before I steal again.” Utilizing advancements in technology and further developments in water digitization (read Tom’s full breakdown here), solutions are emerging. So put on your detective badge and start investigating. Inefficient pumps are pretty sloppy, and they leave clues. Centrifugal pumps do not put out a constant outflow—their output can vary

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Curiosity, Courage, and Steel Boots: These Bentley Engineers Want Women to See STEM As a Chance to ‘Shape Solutions the World Has Never Seen’

In This Story… We celebrate Ada Lovelace, considered by many the world’s first computer programmer. Curiosity sparked these women’s journeys into engineering. Mentorship and networks help women thrive in STEM careers. Growing up in Cucuta, Colombia, Sharon Soler often popped across the border with her family to Venezuela for vacations. On one trip when she was around 14, her family went off the beaten tourist track, crossing the large bridge that straddles oil-rich Lake Maracaibo.  Soler was fascinated by the massive oil and gas rigs offshore. “I was curious about what was happening there,” Soler recalls. “We even started to joke a little bit in the car with my family, like: ‘Wow, let’s figure it out, how petroleum is extracted.’”   That trip proved to be a game changer for Soler, who had been considering a career in medicine. Instead, she pursued undergraduate and master’s degrees in petroleum engineering, going on to work for Schlumberger, IBM, and Halliburton in locations stretching from the Amazon rainforest in Peru to the deserts of Qatar.   Soler is now the solutions manager for energy at Bentley Systems, the global infrastructure engineering software company. She works to match Bentley digital tools to customer needs in

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The Future of Memory: Japanese Professor Uses 3D Technology to Redefine How We Experience History

On a laptop screen in a quiet lab at the University of Tokyo, the city of Hiroshima unfolds in unnerving detail. Streets, houses, rivers — all reconstructed as they stood on a bright summer morning in 1945. Then, with a few clicks, the map reveals what came after: devastation stretching in every direction. It’s not a movie clip or a static photo. It’s a way to zoom, pan, and step through the city. This is history revealed as a living, explorable world. This is the work of Hidenori Watanave, a professor and information design specialist who has spent two decades transforming how we engage with memory. His projects include interactive archives of the people who survived the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, real-time maps of the war in Ukraine, and a full 3D model of a Japanese Navy Type Zero Reconnaissance Seaplane pulled from the sea. All of his projects share a single mission: to connect people across time and space, to events they might otherwise only encounter in textbooks or headlines. And increasingly, those worlds are powered by Cesium, the open-source 3D geospatial platform that can stream vast datasets into a browser while rendering fine detail at every scale —

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From Drone Scans to Digital Twins: Bentley Accelerator Awards $250,000 to Startups Using 3D Tech for Infrastructure 

Bentley Systems has awarded four innovative startups up to $250,000 as part of its annual accelerator program, including a Las Vegas firm that transforms drone scans into explorable 3D environments and an Amsterdam-based startup that creates photoreal CGI visuals for online businesses. iTwin Activate is a program that fosters collaboration between Bentley, the infrastructure engineering software company, and early-stage startups in the industry. The 2025 program is focused on companies that use 3D geospatial data to improve infrastructure such as roads, railways, bridges, water networks, and the electric grid. This year’s selected companies work in a wide array of fields, including e-commerce, construction design, railway and highway maintenance, and urban asset management. “The intent of the program is to support our objective of growing an ecosystem of folks building on our platform technology,” says James Kress, director of digital acceleration for iTwin Ventures at Bentley Systems, who runs the program. During the four-month program, each startup will build a project on Cesium and 3D Tiles, an open standard created by Cesium.  (Bentley acquired Cesium in 2024.) They’ll be supported by technical experts, gaining additional industry and market insights from Bentley’s product leaders. Participants will also receive funding of up to $250,000 each

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Bridging The Infrastructure Talent Gap: This Digital Twin Contest Serves as a Training Ground for Future Engineers 

Jona Schubert has always been fascinated by how things work. As a child in the small South American country of Suriname, he says he “kept asking too many questions and loved figuring things out.”   When Schubert was 8 years old, his father gave him an especially exciting toy: a remote-controlled car. “I just tore it  apart to look at what was inside, what drove it, what makes the wheels move, and how I was able to remotely control it,” he says. “Then I tried to put it back together. Needless to say, that wasn’t successful! But that moment has stuck with me since then.”  That drive to find out how things work – and to discover ways to make them work better – has taken the geoscience graduate on quite a journey. After graduating in 2021, Schubert worked as a geoscientist and mine engineer in the rainforests of his native Suriname. A post-graduate course in energy and power systems management at the U.K.’s University of Portsmouth followed. Then last October, Schubert took the stage in Kazakhstan’s capital, Astana, as a finalist in a prestigious international competition where students use digital twins – realistic and dynamic digital models of a physical

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Tech That Matters: Turning Data Into Smarter, Safer and More Resilient Cities that Work for Everyone

What makes a city smart? For Luke Antoniou, senior editor at SmartCitiesWorld, it’s using data and technology to improve how people live, work, and move through urban spaces. We caught up with Antoniou in Dublin in May at the first Urban Tech Challenge, where he served as a judge. The event was organized by Bentley Systems, the global infrastructure engineering software company and brought together students, academics, and technologists to improve urban infrastructure planning. We talked with Antoniou about how cities address complex challenges like flooding, mobility, and emergency services and how they’re using digital twins, AI, and open data to get smarter and move faster. Antoniou was quick to point out that real change doesn’t happen in isolation. It takes collaboration between planners, technologists, policymakers, residents and other stakeholders. The key, he says, is usability: cities already have vast amounts of data, but unless urban solutions and platforms are intuitive and accessible to everyone, from engineers to frontline city staff, that data goes to waste. In our conversation, Antoniou explained what success looks like and why cities must think people-first to be truly smart. Tomas Kellner: What is SmartCitiesWorld? Actually, let’s start at the beginning: What is a smart

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Ideas, Impact, and AI: 7 Leaders Shaping the Future of Infrastructure

Infrastructure is made of steel and concrete, but its future is being built in code. A new wave of engineers, scientists, and visionaries is using artificial intelligence (AI), open data, and curiosity to solve problems that once seemed too hard to crack — from cutting carbon to predicting floods to using digital twins to design cities. Take a look: High Wire Act: From Jokes to Marathons, Bentley’s AI Guru Delivers Under Pressure Karl-Alexandre Jahjah is going the distance to drive Bentley Systems’ AI breakthroughs and push the boundaries of infrastructure engineering. The avid marathoner brings a competitive, goal-oriented mindset to his role as director of applied AI — along with a curious, creative perspective and collaborative leadership approach honed through more than a dozen years on Quebec’s improv comedy circuit.. The former physics researcher leads a Bentley team building the next generation of infrastructure tools, including the generative AI-powered OpenSite+ infrastructure design software. “People are still skeptical about what AI can actually deliver,” Jahjahsays. “That’s why it matters that we get it right.” Emily Zhang, Associate Software Engineer at Bentley Systems How the ‘City of Bridges’ Inspired a Rising Engineer’s Career. She’s now Bringing Generative AI to Infrastructure Emily Zhang’s

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This Engineer Gave AI a Job: It Learns the Software So He Doesn’t Have To

At the 2025 Bentley Illuminate conference in Atlanta, one presentation turned many heads. Kyle Rosenmeyer, a model-based design leader at the engineering firm VHB and a Bentley software superuser, talked about a simple but powerful use of generative AI in the form of Microsoft’s Copilot Studio. He used the platform to build a custom AI agent that helps engineers take advantage of Bentley engineering software’s powerful features—fast. I wanted to learn more, so I caught up with Rosenmeyer during a wide-ranging conversation about point clouds, generative AI, and the future of design work. Join us in the conversation below: Tomas Kellner: Hi Kyle, thank you for joining me, especially right after a dentist appointment. Kyle Rosenmeyer: Yeah, happy to be here. It was a pretty high-tech experience actually. They scanned my tooth using photogrammetry. It’s basically the same principle we use to build point clouds in infrastructure work, just at a way smaller scale. TK: That’s wild. So instead of laser scanning a road, they’re scanning your molar. KR: Exactly. And it reminded me how a single core technology—like point clouds—can show up everywhere, from digital twins of bridges to dental crowns. Anyway, it got me thinking about how much

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The Joy of Not Knowing: Inside One Professor’s Quest To Rethink Engineering for the Age of AI and Open Data

Tomas Ward isn’t your typical computer science professor. A self-described “noob,” Ward heads up data analytics at the School of Computing at Dublin City University and serves as site director of Insight, one of Ireland’s largest AI research centers. But it’s not titles that drive him—it’s tinkering. Ward is a champion of curiosity, experimentation, and joyful failure. Whether organizing maker festivals or encouraging students to dive headfirst into hands-on urban tech challenges, Ward sees data and technology as tools for collective experimentation and progress. To him, a smart city isn’t just a city that uses data; it’s one where citizens shape their environment through access, openness, and play. We caught up with Ward in June during the first Urban Tech Challenge organized at DCU by Bentley System, the global infrastructure engineering software company. The hackathon brought together students, academics, and technologists to find solutions to real urban problems. We talked about how he teaches, how he learns, what he wants every student to take away, and why open data is critical to smart city innovation. Bentley: Why are events like the Urban Tech Challenge important for students, for DCU, and for Dublin? Tomas Ward: I’m a big fan of the

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