Ferrovial, Acciona and Beca are among the highways engineering firms that came up winners in this year’s Bentley System’s Going Digital Awards in Infrastructure.
Bentley Systems, the infrastructure engineering software company, announced the winners at the company’s annual awards that honour the work of Bentley software users to advance infrastructure design, construction and operations throughout the world.
Finalists presented their projects at the recent event in London before 11 independent jury panels. The jurors determined the winners of the 12 award categories from 36 finalists that were shortlisted from around 300 nominations submitted by more than 180 organisations from 47 countries.
Winners that used Bentley solutions for road and bridge works included Ferrovial Construction and Alamo Construction, taking top honours in the Bridges and Tunnels category for their IH35 Nex project in San Antonio in the US state of Texas.
Ferrovial, through its subsidiaries, Ferrovial Construction and Webber, was selected by the Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT) in early 2021 for the Interstate 35 Northeast Expansion (NEX) design-build project. The estimated value of the project is more than US$1.5 billion with construction starting in 2022 and spanning about six years.
The project consists of the design, construction and maintenance of around 15km of non-tolled improvements along I-35, including the construction of around 29km of additional elevated main lanes. According to the Ferrovial website, the project scope consists of construction of elevated managed lanes between the existing main lanes and frontage roads and eight bridges, and the reconstruction and widening of the Loop 1604 general purpose lanes and bridges. It includes more than 800 spans of bridge construction, 4,500 concrete beams, 31 million pounds of steel girders and six million square feet of bridge decks.
The existing I-35 corridor runs around 855km across Texas from the Mexican border to the border with the state of Oklahoma. As the largest interstate highway connecting Mexico and Canada through the US heartland, the I-35 corridor carries the majority of Mexico’s trade with the US and Canada.
Meanwhile, in the general construction category, ACCIONA picked up the award for safely removing dangerous level crossings using digital construction systems in Melbourne, Australia.
For the roads and highways category, the winner was the cooperation between New Zealand’s road agency Waka Kotahi, the joint venture of Fulton Hogan and HEB – FH/HEB JV – and BECA for their Takitimu North Link Tauranga project in the Western Bay of Plenty region near Auckland, New Zealand.
In the Geo-professional category, Mott MacDonald won for its project, driving efficiency and sustainability in material reuse through GeoBIM, in Birmingham, England.
Solutions from Bentley Systems, based near Philadelphia in the US are used for the design, construction and operations of roads and bridges, rail and transit, water and wastewater, public works and utilities, buildings and campuses, mining and industrial facilities. Bentley said that the entrants’ presentations illustrate how Bentley’s users tackle the challenges and achieve objectives by leveraging the latest digital advancements.
All the winners and their projects can be viewed by clicking here.
The company’s offerings include MicroStation-based applications for modeling and simulation, ProjectWise for project delivery, AssetWise for asset and network performance, Seequent’s leading geo-professional software portfolio and the iTwin platform for infrastructure digital twins. Bentley employs more than 4,500 and has annual revenue of around US$1 billion in 186 countries.
