At Bentley System’s annual “Year in Infrastructure” conference in London Oct. 15-18, the software company announced and explained several recent additions to its growing portfolio of infrastructure design, development and operations tools and shared the strategic thinking behind those acquisitions with its user’s.

The conference is built around an awards program that recognizes significant infrastructure projects from around the world and the role the vendor’s software has in their accomplishment. Contest judges for this year’s program reviewed 420 nominations from 60 countries and 340 submitting organizations.  

In June Bentley brought 4D scheduling and construction planning tool Syncho Software into the fold. That was followed by its purchase of Stockholm-based Agency9, a company that has created city-scale digital twin cloud services with web-based 3D visualizations in Sweden. That acquisition lets Bentley roll out combined capabilities more broadly in a product called OpenCities Planner. Agency9 has been putting Bentley’s ContextCapture software to work to build the digital context for urban infrastructure assets.

Bentley also debuted its acquisition of LEGION, a widely employed product that uses artificial intelligence to model pedestrian traffic in large facilities like stadiums, airports and train stations. The software can predict the movements of people as they interact with each other and physical obstacles in public spaces. With the acquisition, LEGION becomes part of the newly announced OpenBuildings Station Designer solution.

And in what the company said is a major strategic initiative, Bentley also announced the integration of its project delivery solution ProjectWise with Microsoft 365’s suite of products, including Teams, Flow, SharePoint, and the data analytics product Power BI. Early adopter AECOM won a Bentley Year in Infrastructure Award for its work tracking project performance using this interface.