Civil Infrastructure Design Gets Boost From Bentley and Topcon

HNTB was one of the early access users of Bentley’s OpenRoads ConceptStation, which enables rapid preliminary design using reality meshes, point clouds and data from other sources.

*IMAGE COURTESY OF HNTB*

Dustin Parkman, vice president for civil and reality modeling, explains the connections.

*IMAGE BY JANICE L. TUCHMAN FOR ENR*

The rise of cloud services, vendor partnerships and software refinement is supporting increasing multi-vendor interoperability of project data for the design, construction and management of roads and bridges.

In London in early November, attendees at Bentley Systems’ “Year in Infrastructure” conference were presented with a progress report on Bentley’s interoperability journey, which now is beginning to reach out to the services of other vendors.

Bentley has been working for years to consolidate its various civil-design software products, including InRoads, GEOPAK, MX and Power Civil. It finally has done it with a new 3D modeler, Bentley OpenRoads Designer, which will become available to early-access users in the first week of December. All the capabilities of those products are now combined. The separate disciplines previously served now are accommodated by selectable user profiles.

The product shares its data using Bentley’s ProjectWise Connect servers. It also can integrate reality-capture survey data, developed with Bentley’s ContextCapture image-processing system, as well as early-design schemes created and evaluated using Bentley’s ConceptStation, introduced in 2015.

Another major new wrinkle is that design data exchange now can be extended—through a relationship with Microsoft and its Azure cloud services—to project servers of other vendors. At the conference, Bentley announced such “connected” relationships with Topcon Positioning Group’s Magnet Enterprise servers and with the asset records of Bureau Veritas, a global engineering validation and inspection service.

The exchange with Topcon is expected to enable a workflow between Bentley’s civil-design tools and asset management products as well as Topcon’s survey and machine control systems. The vision is that survey data will flow directly into design, then return to control graders and pavers, and then circle back again, further enhanced from the machines to asset management as a real-time, as-built record of work put-in-place.

“Although the OpenRoads Designer product is brand-new, its functionality already has been at the core of the model-based design of the previous, separate products,” said CEO Greg Bentley. In the OpenRoads suite, “no data is lost,” he explains, from concept to detailed design—across multiple disciplines—and into construction. The suite includes OpenRoads Navigator, which runs on Windows but also on iOS or Android devices, assuring the visibility of project status from the office to the field.

Dustin Parkman, Bentley vice president of civil and reality modeling, said that, in OpenRoads Designer, “[features] being modeled are intelligent components for infrastructure.” He says that will help users to understand earlier the financial implications of design options and carry early decisions directly into design. Parkman adds that the new product retains the ability to produce deliverables characteristic of each of the predecessor products but also includes enhancements and cloud-service features designed to unite work in OpenRoads models with work in other, similarly connected tools.

“It’s the whole interface of providing information to a user to do design and analysis—the whole way of working has an opportunity to change,” commented Peter Vale, engineering information manager with Thames Tideway Tunnel.

Consulting Editor Tom Sawyer began his journalism career at the Atlantic City Press, in N.J. The former ENR editor expanded technology coverage and devised ENR's popular annual photo contest. Tom has also written memorable special reports from disaster and war zones, often taking the lead when earthquakes and hurricanes strike. His technology, disaster and war-related reporting has involved trips to Iraq, Haiti, Japan and other countries.

After serving as editor-in-chief for 20 years, Jan Tuchman was former executive editor, leading content development for Engineering News-Record's wide-ranging series of live and virtual events. These include the Groundbreaking Women in Construction, the Emerging Leaders Forum, FutureTech and infrastructure forums in the New York/New Jersey region and Los Angeles. Tuchman is the 2023-24 chair of the American Society of Civil Engineers Industry Leaders Council, she is a member of the Columbia University Center for Infrastructure, Facilities and Public Spaces, and she is active in The Moles, a heavy construction leadership organization. Her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in journalism are from the University of Colorado in Boulder. Industry honors include the Ted C. Kennedy Award from the National Academy of Construction and the service and supply award from the Beavers. She lives in Park Slope, Brooklyn, and enjoys singing in the Brooklyn Community Chorus.

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