This week in Singapore, Bentley Systems has announced several acquisitions and partnerships, along with new products we have touched on in an earlier report. This report focuses on its new buys—Citilabs and Orbit Geospatial Technologies (Orbit GT).
City Digital Twins
While the company is known for its software for the design, engineering, and delivery and management of infrastructure, the modern city today is becoming a “smart city,” which essentially means its connected and using data, often real-time, intelligently. To help advance the idea of “digital twins” for the smart city, Bentley made two key acquisitions that dovetail nicely with its existing products in this space.
Citilab’s CUBE simulation software shown here provides predictive transportation technology, helping engineers and planners to design and optimize safe, efficient, effective, and environmentally sustainable mobility systems.
By acquiring Citilabs the company now gains both simulation (CUBE) and analytics (Streetlytics) software. These tools complement Orbit GT’s 3D mobile mapping software. Orbit GT’s tools work through drone and vehicle-mounted 365-degree laser and camera systems—a similar technology that Google uses for its streets views but different in that it possesses highly accurate spatial data.
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…
Road mobility digital twins converge a city’s digital context—including the spatial scan-based data from Orbit GT along with “digital components” from Bentley’s OpenRoads—with CUBE simulations to model and assure real-world throughput capacity for proposed and existing roadway assets. Streetlytics traffic data will become increasingly available through Bentley’s cloud services to calibrate and validate mobility digital twins.
Citilab’s Streetlytics provides mobility data and analytics on the moving population for planners, engineers, and infrastructure asset managers to make data-informed decisions about transportation trends.
Robert Mankowski, vice president, digital cities, for 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 modeling of roadways, as envisioned and realized by Peter Bonne, and his family, in leading the team behind Orbit GT. This will serve communities and regions in designing, testing, and optimizing the resilience of their mobility infrastructure.”
More on Citilabs
Citilab’s CUBE simulation software provides world-leading predictive transportation technology, helping engineers and planners to design and optimize safe, efficient, effective, and environmentally sustainable mobility systems.
Citilab’s Streetlytics provides mobility data and analytics on the moving population within the U.S. and Canada for planners, engineers, and infrastructure asset managers to make data-informed decisions about transportation trends.
Michael Clarke, president, and CEO of Citilabs said, “We are excited to become a part of Bentley Systems. 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, behavioral 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.”
More on Orbit Geospatial Technologies
Orbit GT’s offerings help users efficiently manage, process, and share very large amounts of imagery, point cloud, and 3D (mobile, oblique, terrestrial, UAS, indoor) mapping data for use with reality modeling and digital twins. Orbit GT’s technology adds to Bentley’s existing digital cities, reality modeling, and point cloud processing offerings including ContextCapture and Pointools.
Peter Bonne, CEO of Orbit GT, said, “Today’s announcement offers our team, partners, and customers a unique opportunity to take a big leap forward in addressing today’s need for increasingly accurate, versatile, manageable, and embedded use of digital twins. Advancing the 3D mapping paradigm has always been at the heart of Orbit GT’s activities. In adding to Bentley’s digital cities offerings, we will jointly broaden the solutions portfolio and provide unprecedented possibilities for collaboration among platforms. I am excited to help build this future together with great teams at Bentley Systems. In effect, we are now advancing 3D mapping to underlie 4D digital twins!”