Bentley Systems announced the acquisitions of Citilabs, provider of CUBE and Streetlytics software, and Orbit Geospatial Technologies (Orbit GT), provider of 3D and mobile mapping software.
The newly acquired technologies, in conjunction with Bentley's existing design integration and digital cities offerings, 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 – including Bentley's OpenRoads engineering applications – 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.
"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,” said Robert Mankowski, vice president, digital cities, Bentley Systems. “...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."
