Bentley Systems bolsters digital cities offerings with acquisitions of Citilabs and Orbit Geospatial Technologies

Bentley Systems, Incorporated 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).

Citilab’s CUBE simulation software provides predictive transportation technology, helping engineers and planners to design and optimise safe, efficient, effective, and environmentally sustainable mobility systems

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.

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.”

Orbit GT’s offerings help users manage, process, and share very large amounts of imagery, point cloud, and 3D mapping data for use with reality modelling and 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.”