Engineering software company Bentley Systems has expanded its capabilities in the important growth area of mobility digital twins with the acquisition of Montreal-based INRO Software, a global leader in multimodal transportation planning, traffic simulation, and mobility visualisation software.
Users of INRO’s multimodal simulation offerings include some of the world’s busiest transit systems and metros, such as Transport for London, Transport for New South Wales, the Washington State Department of Transportation, the Swedish Transport Administration Trafikverket, and the public transport system of São Paulo SPTrans.
INRO has contributed to the advancement of mobility simulation and modelling for metropolitan, regional, and national transport and transit operators and planning agencies for more than 40 years and its products include Emme, a multimodal transportation planning system for urban, regional, and national transportation forecasting; Dynameq, a vehicle-based traffic simulation platform for city-wide traffic planning; and CityPhi, a mobility visualisation solution providing data visualisation and visual analytics of large-scale mobility and geospatial datasets.
Dr Michael Florian, founder of INRO, said: “Bentley is a recognised leader in transportation across the infrastructure lifecycle from planning and design to heavy civil construction and road network management. My colleagues and I are very excited to join Bentley and to help realise the vision shared by thousands of cities and urban regions throughout the world to improve their sustainability and quality of life.”
The acquisition expands Bentley’s capabilities in the area of mobility digital twins and combining the capabilities of INRO’s advanced traffic and vehicle simulation with Bentley’s passenger and pedestrian simulation and civil design software, including CUBE, Streetlytics, LEGION, and OpenRoads, places Bentley in a strong position to deliver comprehensive mobility digital twins of multimodal transportation systems at urban, metropolitan, regional, and national scale.
“We are very pleased to welcome INRO to Bentley Systems,” said Robert Mankowski, senior vice president, digital cities, Bentley Systems. “Professor Michael Florian and his team led the research of advanced multimodal network modelling methods which helped establish state-of-the-art mobility simulation, and in this next generation his son Dan is leading its software future in our mobility digital twin advancement. With the addition of INRO and its world-class team, Bentley Systems can even better accelerate cities and regions in going digital to build back better.”
Caption – Image produced with Emme (www.inrosoftware.com/emme) using data from Metro (www.oregonmetro.gov/)