Infrastructure software manufacturer Bentley Systems has acquired the assets, staff and services of UK-based infrastructure capital projects ComplyPro.

The managed services provider has become a division of Bentley and will be led by ComplyPro founder Chris Rolison. The development of ComplyPro's software and services will continue to operate out of Birmingham, in the UK, while its sales activities will be merged into Bentley's global offices.

Speaking at the company's 2016 Year in Infrastructure conference, in London, Bentley chief product officer Bhupinder Singh commented that the users Bentley shared with ComplyPro had stressed the potential benefits for asset program owners that could result from the integration of the companies’ requirements management and compliance management functions in Bentley's project delivery and asset performance solutions.

"Now we can continue to learn from cumulative and ongoing experience of existing ComplyPro users, as they further apply cloud services across their life cycle. As AssetWise Connect has been joined with the ProjectWise Connect program, this provides us with the ideal opportunity for us to implement the full scope of progressive assurance advancing, through digital engineering models to asset performance modelling," he stated.

SOFTWARE FOCUS
Bentley has also announced that its new OpenRoads Designer Connect software will be available for early access on December 1. The system is the successor to its civil engineering software brands, namely InRoads, GEOPAK, MX and PowerCivil.

Singh explained that OpenRoads Designer was a comprehensive, multidiscipline three-dimensional (3D) modelling application that had been developed to advance the delivery of roadway projects from conceptual design through to construction. "OpenRoads Designer blends traditional engineering workflows for plan, profile and cross-sections with 3D parametric modelling to enable the model-centric creation of all design deliverables."

He noted that OpenRoads Designer supported all aspects of a detailed roadway design including, but not limited to, survey, geotechnical, drainage, subsurface utilities, terrain, road and roadway furniture. Singh said that the incorporation of reality meshed imagery, point cloud and other geocoordinated data sources provided the continuous context of "real-world" conditions throughout the design and construction life cycle.

Bentley CEO Greg Bentley added that, since the company acquired and assimilated the ContextCapture software solution into its offering in 2015, the company had noticed the "proliferation" of reality modelling across users’ projects. He, therefore, believes that this will become a mainstream contributor to infrastructure project delivery and asset performance.

Reality modelling describes the continuous capture of infrastructure assets.

Bentley remarked that, to date, reality modelling had processed digital photos acquired from ground level and/or aerial photography, particularly from the burgeoning industrial use of unmanned aerial vehicles.

However, Bentley revealed that the company had made "a significant breakthrough" in its ContextCapture software system, which will be released next month. Available point-clouds from laser scanning will be able to be combined with available photos as operated "hybrid inputs" for reconstruction into a reality mesh.

"The advantages of reality modelling in the case of laser scanning and the superior engineering-ready mesh result, compared with the bulky and unintelligent point-clouds themselves, are now compelling in every circumstance across the range of scanner or camera devices of asset characteristics and of caption conditions," he contended.

Bentley believed that reality modelling would assist in answering the question of how drones, mixed-reality devices, the industrial Internet of Things and young tech-savvy people, or the so called "digital natives", would converge to advance infrastructure engineering, project delivery and asset performance.