Bentley acquires pedestrian simulation software firm Legion

Bentley Systems has hit the acquisition trail, buying two digital companies.
October 16, 2018 Read time: 2 mins

The first is UK-based pedestrian simulation software company Legion. Infrastructure software provider Bentley says the acquisition will mean it can improve pedestrian circulation, throughput, and overall safety at the planning stage of the projects with which it is involved.

“Because pedestrian traffic and capacity are major concerns for infrastructure planning and operations, collaborative digital workflows for pedestrian simulation need to be prioritised during design,” explains Santanu Das, senior vice president of design engineering for Bentley.

Legion’s pedestrian simulation application models the interactions of people with each other and with physical obstacles in public spaces, including the way they interact with vehicles at street level.

These can be used with Bentley’s OpenBuildings Designer to consider how pedestrian traffic is likely to behave. Legion founder Douglas Connor says: “Pedestrian flows should be considered fundamental design criteria for infrastructure assets.”

The second of Bentley’s acquisitions is Agency9, a Swedish firm which provides municipalities with city-scale digital twin cloud services for city planning and web-based 3D visualisation. Agency9 already uses the reality meshes created by Bentley’s ContextCapture reality modeling software.

The services dovetail with Bentley’s new iTwin cloud services, which the company says will enable OpenCities Planner to offer more detail to urban planners.

“Our many city users globally have been asking for the useful capabilities which Agency9 has successfully implemented throughout Sweden, to take further advantage of their reality modelling programmes,” says Phil Christensen, Bentley’s senior vice president, reality modelling.

Håkan Engman, CEO of Agency9, says that becoming part of Bentley means that “we can foresee the realisation of our users’ vision to advance from urban planning to improving cities’ asset performance”.

GIS/ Mapping & Location Based Systems

For more information on companies in this article

Related Content

  • Report highlights ways to make roads safer for pedestrians
    November 23, 2012
    A report released by the International Transport Forum (ITF) at the OECD highlights the role of national governments in improving pedestrian mobility and proposes twelve measures to create safer walking environments. The study, entitled Pedestrian Safety, Urban Space and Health, was prepared by a working group of transport experts and urban planners from nineteen countries and the World Health Organisation under the leadership of the ITF. The report comes to a number of conclusions, including the fact that
    Read More
  • Daimler’s double take sees machine vision move in-vehicle
    December 13, 2013
    Jason Barnes looks at Daimler’s Intelligent Drive programme to consider how machine vision has advanced the state of the art of vision-based in-vehicle systems. Traditionally, radar was the in-vehicle Driver Assistance System (DAS) technology of choice, particularly for applications such as adaptive cruise control and pre-crash warning generation. Although vision-based technology has made greater inroads more recently, it is not a case of ‘one sensor wins’. Radar and vision are complementary and redundancy
    Read More
  • Internet-connected cars their functionality and safety challenges
    February 27, 2013
    Internet-connected cars are poised to flood the market in the near future. Pete Goldin considers the functionality they offer, the technology they use and the challenge they represent in terms of driver safety. Many vehicles on the road today offer some sort of inter­net connectivity and experts agree that this capability will become a competi­tive differentiator in the automotive industry in the next few years. The era of the digital vehicle, it seems, has started. “We clearly see that cars in the near f
    Read More
  • Green light in US for C-V2X intersection technology
    March 19, 2024
    Applied Information, Haas Alert and Audi involved in public test on traffic signals
    Read More

Highlighted Content