JMT is proud to announce that our Digital Experience for I-95 Rappahannock River Crossing construction project was selected as the winner of the Bentley Systems 2024 Going Digital Award – Bridges and Tunnels category! 

The award was presented to JMT representatives Garth Donahue, PE, director of the Design Center of Excellence, and Vince Novak, director of digital experience for JMT Technology Group, at the Bentley Systems Year in Infrastructure 2024 Going Digital Awards event in Vancouver, BC, on Wednesday, October 9. According to Bentley, 250 projects were nominated, and winners were selected from 36 finalists in 12 categories. JMT’s Design Center of Excellence and Technology Group collaborated to make this effort successful. Congratulations to the project team on this exciting award! 

Learn about the digital experience by clicking here.

About the Work:

JMT was the lead designer for I-95 southbound and northbound design-build projects to add six miles of six new general-purpose lanes. The lanes were added to the existing median of I-95, and the existing lanes were converted to a collector-distributor road between Route 3 and Route 17.  By using Bentley products from start to finish, the project team created more than just paper documents, but a whole digital journey that would have been virtually unthinkable without Bentley's "Open" Design platforms. Northbound presented a new challenge that differed from the southbound project. VDOT required a BIM execution plan and certain model deliverables to be part of the final product. JMT utilized multiple Bentley design and collaboration technologies to meet these requirements and go further. The project was set up on ProjectWise as our common data environment with managed workspaces to ensure the consistency of the project team. The roadway design was fully modeled and designed within OpenRoads along with critical disturbance areas like drainage swales and stormwater management basins. The bridges were modeled with OpenBridge Modeler to evaluate and clearly define the bridges.

With a model built, the team was able to bring it to life in LumenRT to generate the important phase animations to tell the project's story. As part of our community outreach initiatives, JMT created a virtual public meeting using JMT’s Virtual Spaces platform. The virtual public meeting featured a visualization created using LumenRT to show project changes and phases over time. Future iterations of these same visualizations can be done using Bentley's Unreal SDK for real-time rendering. The added benefit of using a virtual public meeting is that there was over three times more engagement with the public compared to traditional in-person meeting venues.

JMT used the iTwin platform to create different experiences to better engage stakeholders and customers. For example, the team used the iTwin.JS and iTwin Experience technologies to create a visualization that incorporated the model reality meshes and freely available 511 data from the State of Virginia that showed traffic in real-time. JMT designed a 3D printed model that could be incorporated with game engines to create an augmented reality experience that users could visualize using an iPad. Using the Apple Vision Pro, full size models can be projected in augmented reality for users to experience what the actual structure will look like.

Modeling between these two projects increased dramatically based on the requirements. The lessons learned from the Southbound project utilizing legacy OpenRoads technology and the need for modeling deliverables on the Northbound project helped encourage the move to current and future technology. Modeling using OpenRoads and OpenBridge in conjunction with ProjectWise aided our collaboration. JMT quickly identified risks early, helping to keep the project moving forward. Modeling allowed the team to build simulations and animations through LumenRT to better communicate the project to stakeholders, leading to a successful public meeting and easing concerns about the project's impact. Utilizing iModels in ProjectWise Infrastructure Cloud enabled us to work with other software and hardware options to showcase this project.  

Learn more here: https://investors.bentley.com/news-releases/news-release-details/bentley-systems-announces-winners-2024-going-digital-awards