Keynotes > Benoit Frédéricque

Local governments are challenged by growing city populations leading to increasing demands on local infrastructure (Road, water, sewer, telecom...). As existing infrastructure deteriorates in these dense urban areas, new infrastructure must be built. 3D City Models have been identified as a tool to help practitioners to deal with the complexity and density of infrastructure in urban areas. 3D City models are more available than ever and are used for numerous applications including urban planning analysis, noise propagation simulations and flood simulations.

Besides the development of 3D City Models in the GIS/Mapping community, the last decade has seen numerous innovations in the management and design of infrastructure modeling technology. The development of Building Information Modeling and more generally of Infrastructure Information Modeling are two of these innovations. All the engineering practices have been shifting towards an information modeling paradigm. These two trends have frequently been referred to as the convergence between CAD/GIS & BIM.

In this presentation, we will look at these different concepts and how they integrate in practice today, how 3D City Model are used by some Bentley users, what intelligence and semantics mean for them and discuss some of the challenges faced. As an example, we will discuss the challenge of interoperability across different industries that apply to the urban context.