UTILIZED SOFTWARE

Leapfrog Works, OpenTunnel Designer, PLAXIS, Cesium

LOCATION 

Portugal

ORGANIZATION/COMPANY 

Ayesa

 AYESA Engineering faced the dual challenge of designing 5.3 km of tunnels and 12 emergency shafts through Porto's highly heterogeneous geology while controlling the carbon and cost of a €1 billion, 37 km metro expansion. Legacy tools such as Revit and Civil 3D produced fragmented workflows that could not model ground treatments or connect to analytical software, forcing constant manual data re-entry across a ground investigation campaign of more than 200 boreholes and 1,200 m of geophysics. AYESA instead linked Bentley's Leapfrog Works, OpenTunnel Designer, PLAXIS, and Cesium into a single integrated BIM workflow - a digital twin acting as one source of truth - with Python automating model generation, calculations, and clash detection and AI agents evaluating results across more than 100 geotechnical scenarios. Optimized tunnel and ground-treatment design cut sprayed concrete by 12% (4,500 m³), avoiding over 1,500,000 kg CO₂e, while saving 4,400 resource hours (26% fewer work hours) and €256,000 in design cost (30%). PLAXIS soil-structure modeling safeguarded the sensitive urban geology, proving digital engineering as the foundation for lower-carbon, resilient transit infrastructure.