What Our Latest Acquisitions Mean for Infrastructure Analytics
Often called the worldās largest machine, the power grid is an engineering marvel that helped supercharge modernity and bring electricity to homes and businesses. Cellular networks come close to the grid in size and importance. They revolutionized communications, banking, transportation, and other critical industries. Both systems now serve as the foundation for the era of artificial intelligence (AI), with one feeding electricity to hyperscale data centers and the other ferrying information and insights. Though largely out of mind, these critical networks and their transmission and cell towers are never entirely out of sight. They dot urban and rural landscapes, including river crossings and steep mountain sides, and keeping them in good shape can be an arduous manual task. Bentley Systems is the leader in infrastructure engineering software, and over the last decade, our Asset Analytics business has been simplifying asset maintenance and operation. Weāve been collecting high-resolution images from drones and other sources that can see features as small as 1 millimeter and using the data to build digital twins, or virtual replicas, of cell and transmission towers. We then use AI and machine learning (ML) to analyze the data and automate cell tower inspections, improve maintenance, catalogue the equipment