Bentley Systems has announced the acquisitions of global mobility simulation (CUBE) and analytics (Streetlytics) software provider Citilabs, and global provider of 3D and mobile mapping software, Orbit Geospatial Technologies (Orbit GT).
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 from 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.
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 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 for 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."
Peter Bonne, CEO of Orbit GT, said, "the acquisition 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."
