Bentley Systems has acquired mobility simulation and analytics software provider Citilabs, as well as Orbit Geospatial Technologies (Orbit GT), a provider of 3D and mobile mapping software.

According to a statement from Bentley, the newly acquired technologies will mesh with the company’s existing design integration and digital cities solutions, and enable engineering-based 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. 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 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,” said Robert Mankowski, vice president, digital cities, for Bentley Systems.

Road mobility digital twins converge a 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, the statement said.