Bentley: Digital Solutions Optimizing Airport Construction & Sustainability
Kamalakannan Thiruvadi, Regional Executive, South Asia, Bentley Systems, highlights how digital solutions and intelligent design tools are optimizing airport construction, improving collaboration, and ensuring long-term sustainability.
Intelligent Infrastructure Solutions for Airport Expansion
Bentley Systems provides intelligent infrastructure solutions that support the entire airport lifecycle, from design and construction to operations and maintenance. With airports worldwide undergoing major expansion projects, India stands out with its ten largest airport expansions valued at over $15 billion.
To facilitate the design and construction of these projects, Bentley Systems offers two key solutions: Airport Engineering and Airport Advanced Project Delivery. These solutions integrate design, analysis, and construction simulation tools to minimize design errors, optimize construction schedules, and enhance collaboration among stakeholders. This approach significantly improves the efficiency of planning, execution, and long-term airport operations.
The data generated by these solutions contributes to creating and enhancing a digital twin, providing instant access to accurate and reliable information in an intuitive format. The Sydney Airport, for example, has leveraged a digital twin to establish a centralized portal for operations and maintenance, resulting in savings of over $1 million AUD in a single year. Bentley Systems emphasizes openness in its solutions, ensuring seamless integration with the existing tools and systems used by airports and engineering firms, enabling them to consolidate their data into a single, efficient platform.
Optimizing Efficiency in Complex Airport Projects
Managing large-scale airport projects is a complex challenge, involving multiple simultaneous developments, diverse contractors, numerous stakeholders, and intricate supply chain logistics. To address these challenges, several major airports worldwide have adopted Bentley’s solutions to streamline project execution, enhance collaboration, and achieve substantial cost and time savings.
The Guangdong Airport Authority leveraged Bentley’s technology to boost design and construction efficiency by 30-35%, resulting in savings of millions of RMB during the five-year terminal expansion project at Guangzhou Baiyun International Airport. Similarly, Taiping International Airport improved collaboration efficiency by 23%, reducing demolition and rework costs by 8 million RMB due to design changes while cutting construction time by 10%.
These projects exemplify how Bentley’s design, analysis, and construction simulation tools enhance design efficiency, optimize construction timelines, minimize resource waste, and promote sustainability in large-scale airport infrastructure development.
Sustainable and Efficient Infrastructure at Noida International Airport
Noida International Airport stands as a prime example of a major Indian airport project leveraging advanced solutions to create a resilient and sustainable water network. This system reduces water consumption from other sources by 90,000 cubic meters annually. By incorporating these technologies, the project also achieved an 8% reduction in construction materials and lowered operational costs by 20%, leading to significant energy and financial savings.
Critical infrastructure like this forms the backbone of a modern airport, ensuring long-term sustainability and resilience. The water network design not only mitigates flooding risks but also enables water capture for reuse, enhancing both safety and sustainability. Bentley’s structural analysis tool (STAAD) is being widely used across several airport projects in India, helping engineers streamline the design process, quickly evaluate multiple design iterations, and ensure compliance with IS codes in a user-friendly environment.
