Bentley Systems Acquires Citilabs and Orbit Geospatial Technologies
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Bentley Systems Acquires Citilabs and Orbit Geospatial Technologies

Bentley Systems, one of the worldwide leading providers of comprehensive software and digital twin cloud services for advancing the design, construction and operations of infrastructure, has announced the acquisition of two companies: Citilabs and Orbit Geospatial Technologies (Orbit GT). Citilabs is a global mobility simulation (CUBE) and analytics (Streetlytics) software provider, while Orbit GT is a global provider of 3D and mobile mapping software. The newly acquired technologies, in conjunction with Bentley’s existing design integration and digital cities offerings, will 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. 

Mobility

Robert Mankowski, vice president of 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 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.” 

About Citilabs

Citilabs' 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. Citilabs' Streetlytics provides mobility data and analytics on the moving population within the US 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, 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.”

About 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 modelling and digital twins. Orbit GT’s technology adds to Bentley’s existing digital cities, reality modelling, 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!” 

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