Bentley Systems has announced the acquisition of global mobility simulation and analytics software provider Citilabs and 3D and mobile mapping software provider Orbit Geospatial Technologies
The acquisitions, announced on the first day of the Year in Infrastructure conference in Singapore, will be used alongside Bentley’s existing design integration and digital cities offerings to enable “engineering-based mobility digital twins“.
Road mobility digital twins converge cities’ digital context, including 4D surveying facilitated by Orbit GT for drone- and vehicle-mounted mobile mapping, and digital components with Citilabs’ CUBE simulations to model and assure real-world throughput capacity for proposed and existing road assets.
Orbit’s Streetlytics traffic data will become increasingly available through Bentley’s cloud services to calibrate and validate mobility digital twins.
Robert Mankowski, vice president for digital cities at Bentley Systems, said: “Mobility is a priority opportunity for city digital twins because too often existing planning and simulation efforts are disconnected from the infrastructure’s engineering reality.
“As the roadway design software leaders, we’re very enthusiastic to be the first to enable engineering-founded mobility digital twins.
“With these acquisitions, we can now bring together traffic simulations, by way of the respected and versatile CUBE software – led by traffic engineer Michael Clarke to have now become a market leader – with automated mobile mapping workflows for reality modelling of roadways, as envisioned and realised by Peter Bonne and his family in leading the team behind Orbit GT.
“This will serve communities and regions in designing, testing, and optimising the resilience of their mobility infrastructure.”
Michael Clarke, president and CEO of Citilabs, said: “Our customers and partners will have a fantastic opportunity to fully integrate the planning, design and operation of multi-modal transportation systems.
“At Citilabs, our mission has been to enable our customers to leverage location-based data, behavioural models and machine learning through our products to understand and forecast movement in our cities, regions and nations.
“Today’s announcement will truly bring together a rich understanding of current and projected travel to improve the design and operation of tomorrow’s mobility systems.”
Peter Bonne, CEO of Orbit GT, added: “In adding to Bentley’s digital cities offerings, we will jointly broaden the solutions portfolio and provide unprecedented possibilities for collaboration among platforms. In effect, we are now advancing 3D mapping to underlie 4D digital twins!”
