AEC TECH NEWS: Bentley introduces common modeling environment for civil design

London — At its annual Year in Infrastructure 2015 Conference, Bentley Systems, Incorporated introduced three civil design software offerings: OpenRoads CONNECT Edition, OpenRoads Navigator CONNECT Edition, and OpenRoads ConceptStation. OpenRoads is Bentley’s successor to its InRoads, GEOPAK, and MX offerings.

“OpenRoads is already known for empowering civil infrastructure project teams to accelerate design, produce intelligent 3D models that enable construction-driven engineering, share information across project teams, and facilitate project delivery,” said Dustin Parkman, Bentley vice president, product development, road, rail, and site design. “With the OpenRoads CONNECT Edition, we complete the reach of our common modeling environment across roads, bridges, rail, geotechnical, and site optimization.

“With this month’s General Access to the OpenRoads Navigator CONNECT Edition app, and our new OpenRoads ConceptStation available for Limited Access in 2016, we are advancing comprehensive project delivery from ‘conceptioneering’ through field workflows and next, construction modeling.”

Bentley’s OpenRoads Navigator CONNECT Edition app provides easy-to-use workflow access to civil design and pay item information in the field. It supports teams working better together to speed approvals and resolve issues during design, construction, and operations. OpenRoads Navigator integrates with ProjectWise to support collaboration for all team members and enable even faster resolution of field issues, resulting in better decisions throughout the lifecycle of a project.

The new OpenRoads ConceptStation CONNECT Edition introduces conceptioneering. Through conceptioneering at the project outset, users are able to balance the demands of creative infrastructure designs with the financial, environmental, and engineering performance requirements of modern infrastructure projects. In conceptioneering, users consider the larger issues to help shape the project’s approach to meeting the programmatic requirements. Accordingly, conceptioneering spans context capture through compelling communication of a design proposal. Throughout the project, users explore design alternatives through optioneering, applying engineering analyses to improve decision making.

OpenRoads ConceptStation will help users explore preliminary design options, leverage functional component catalogs, optimize project performance, and rapidly make decisions in the pre-bid phase to avoid high-cost errors, Bentley said. This conceptual design workflow takes full advantage of reality modeling — first to enable engineering in context, including reality meshes from ContextCapture, and then to enliven the engineered environment through LumenRT, including moving traffic and dynamic landscaping. With OpenRoads ConceptStation, engineers can evaluate designs and associated costs faster and more easily, present projects through immersive visualization, and continuously advance conceptual designs through project delivery by way of Bentley’s CONNECT Edition common modeling environment.

Additional information is available at https://www.bentley.com/en/products/brands/openroads.