Bentley Systems has acquired SignCAD systems, a provider of software for traffic sign design and manufacturing. The firm is said to provide sign design solutions to 43 state departments of transportation in the US, as well as several cities, counties, engineering firms, and manufacturers.
According to a statement from Bentley, SignCADs sign-design capabilities are expected to complement Bentleys OpenRoads civil design software for roadway projects.
For the past five years, we have been working diligently on increasing the level of detail that can be modeled and simulated within the OpenRoads environment. With the addition of SignCAD, 3D modeling of signs within the context of our roadway designs allows us to provide a higher fidelity representation of roadway assets, yielding benefits beyond design and construction workflows, said Dustin Parkman, VP, civil infrastructure design engineering for Bentley Systems.
The acquisition is said to add to Bentleys ability to provide solutions for the design and construction of transportation assets. It will also allow Bentley to better serve roadway asset owners for the purposes of maintaining safer construction work zones, while sustaining roadway performance criteria for the public, the statement said.
In this new era of autonomous vehicles, the digital representation of roadway networks is quickly becoming just as vital as the physical roadway. Faded or obscured signs and unusual intersections are commonplace throughout most of worlds roadway networks, presenting new and interesting challenges for roadway ownerschallenges that often cannot be met by physical upgrades alone. To bridge that gap, we need a digital representation of roadway assets often referred to as a digital twin.
Roadway signs provide important information about the road network that can be leveraged far beyond conventional line of site machine learning methods, to provide additional depth of information and calibration. With the addition of SignCAD, Bentleys digital twin for roadway assets will provide this valuable data to roadway asset owners, Parkman added.
Judd Roby, president of SignCAD concluded, We are extremely excited about adding SignCAD into the realm of 3D modeling with OpenRoads. This acquisition supports our goals of continuing to meet the transportation owner/operators needs across the design, build, operate, and maintain lifecycle.
