Bentley Systems, Incorporated, the infrastructure engineering software company, recently announced the acquisition of INRO Software, a multimodal transportation planning, traffic simulation, and mobility visualisation software firm. The company stated in a company news release that the acquisition would help expand its capabilities in the area of mobility digital twins, just as countries such as the United States are poised to make a generational investment in infrastructure, and as transportation systems must evolve faster to accommodate both urbanisation and carbon reduction goals, and the transition to electric and autonomous vehicles. INRO, based in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, has for more than 40 years, contributed to the advancement of mobility simulation and modelling for metropolitan, regional, and national transport and transit operators and planning agencies. Users of its multimodal simulation include 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’s 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. Advancing mobility digital twins 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, will enable Bentley to deliver comprehensive mobility digital twins of multimodal transportation systems at urban, metropolitan, regional, and national scale. Urban planners are seeking to understand the ongoing impacts—on transportation system performance, reliability, and accessibility—of the new opportunities and challenges of private and shared mobility, the propensity for cycling or walking, connected autonomous vehicles, and potential congestion charging. With respect to their traditionally circumscribed use of transportation modelling tools in isolation and only on occasion, multiple advantages are now attainable through mobility digital twins, which can be continuously updated with as-operated engineering conditions and with observed traffic data. Mobility digital twins bring these functions together so that infrastructure planning and simulations can be continuously valuable throughout engineering, construction, and operations. As the leader in infrastructure digital twins, Bentley’s iTwin platform can now bring together—with the best-validated aggregate and individual vehicle and pedestrian simulation—3D/4D continuous surveying and reality modeling, civil engineering and project delivery, and asset and network performance. Ultimately, the opportunity for digital cities is to save their constituents time in their day, while at the same time improving congestion and climate resilience, and safety. Bentley Systems offers software solutions in design, construction, and operations of roads and bridges, rail and transit, water and wastewater, public works and utilities, buildings and campuses, and industrial facilities. Image: Images produced by INRO’s Emme