Skip to main content

Bentley’s OpenRoads Designer CONNECT Edition Advances Roadway Projects

OpenRoads’ Comprehensive Modeling Environment Leverages BIM Advancements to Empower Project Delivery LONDON – The Year in Infrastructure 2016 Conference – 1 November 2016 – Bentley Systems, Incorporated, a leading global provider of comprehensive software solutions for advancing infrastructure, today announced that OpenRoads Designer CONNECT Edition will be available for Early Access on December 1, 2016.
November 15, 2016 Read time: 4 mins
OpenRoads Designer introduces a new comprehensive modeling environment to provide construction driven engineering

OpenRoads’ Comprehensive Modeling Environment Leverages BIM Advancements to Empower Project Delivery


LONDON – The Year in Infrastructure 2016 Conference – 1 November 2016 – 4019 Bentley Systems, Incorporated, a leading global provider of comprehensive software solutions for advancing infrastructure, today announced that OpenRoads Designer CONNECT Edition will be available for Early Access on December 1, 2016. OpenRoads CONNECT Edition is the successor to Bentley’s industry leading civil engineering brands InRoads, GEOPAK, MX, and PowerCivil.

OpenRoads Designer is a comprehensive, multi-discipline 3D modeling application to advance the delivery of roadway projects from conceptual design through construction. OpenRoads Designer blends traditional engineering workflows for plan, profile, and cross-sections with 3D parametric modeling to enable the model-centric creation of all design deliverables.

OpenRoads Designer supports all aspects of a detailed roadway design including survey, geotechnical, drainage, subsurface utilities, terrain, road, roadway furniture, and more. The incorporation of reality meshes, imagery, point cloud, and other geocoordinated data sources can provide the continuous context of real-world conditions throughout the design and construction lifecycle.


OpenRoads Designer completes the convergence of InRoads, GEOPAK, MX, and PowerCivil, but adds many powerful new innovations, including:

  • Progressive Conceptual Design. Users can directly progress conceptual designs created with OpenRoads ConceptStation, preserving all work and data. (OpenRoads ConceptStation enables rapid conceptual and preliminary design, leveraging existing context captured through reality meshes, point clouds, GIS, and other sources, and creating compelling presentations with engineering precision.)
  • Contextual Design. All detailed design in OpenRoads Designer is driven by functional components, which inherently respond contextually to express appropriate design, annotation, and plan set display behaviors. Design models are expressed in multiple live views including plan, profile, cross section, and 3D; changes in one view are live and dynamically update all views.
  • Multi-discipline Support. OpenRoads Designer integrates support for each discipline with specific user profiles dedicated to each discipline. Users can switch discipline perspectives, for instance from Road Design profile to Subsurface Utility profile.
  • Reality Modeling Tools. OpenRoads Designer includes a fully-functioned toolset to incorporate and edit all reality modeling data types, including the capability to extract ground-level features from reality meshes and LiDAR, as well as to reference point clouds and imagery.
  • Geotechnical Tools. Users can connect directly to gINT geotechnical databases to incorporate subsurface terrain details into their models for improving grading and piling. Subsurface terrains can be generated or modeled based on the bore hole materials and projected in road and drainage profiles, sections, and plans.
  • Subsurface Utilities. Users can select from a large catalog of functional components for utility and drainage to model underground drainage and utility networks. Drainage models, moreover, can be optimized for water flow using integrated water analysis tools, with results available in data tables or visually in a profile view.
  • Rich Deliverables. An expanded set of deliverables range from traditional plan sets and animations to digital construction models—for automated machine control and field positioning systems including for excavation, grading, piling, and paving.
  • Live Plan Generation. Plan generation need no longer be a separate process limited to a point in time, as settings and annotations are dynamically updated and live in the model. Views are saved with specific display rules and sheet index embedded, making it easy to navigate between model and drawings. Up-to-date drawings can be generated automatically at any time, creating a natural and fluid design environment for both modeling and detailing.
  • Enlivened Visualization. OpenRoads Designer provides direct integration to Bentley LumenRT for producing cinematic visualization, adding vegetation, reflecting nature and climate, and for traffic simulation with VISSIM.

Designs created in OpenRoads Designer benefit from BIM Review through OpenRoads Navigator, in the office, in the field, and at the site. OpenRoads Navigator enables not only visualization and review of 3D designs, but also status visibility—allowing dispersed teams to progress approvals and the resolution of issues.

Bhupinder Singh, chief product officer, Bentley Systems, said, “OpenRoads CONNECT Edition is the culmination of three decades of Bentley leadership and experience gained from thousands of roadway projects around the world. We have conscientiously preserved concepts and continuity from GEOPAK, InRoads, and MX—but the BIM advancements in OpenRoads Designer CONNECT Edition are so compelling that we and our users are excited to now take full advantage of this next generation in roadway design software.”

About OpenRoads CONNECT Edition

OpenRoads CONNECT Edition, by integrating OpenRoads ConceptStation, OpenRoads Designer, and OpenRoads Navigator, ensures a comprehensive modeling environment for the delivery of roadway projects, streamlining and automating workflows across all disciplines to progress designs from conception to detailed design and through construction. OpenRoads’ immersive 3D modeling environment also leverages 3D reality meshes for continuously surveyed context of site conditions throughout design and construction.

Project delivery teams, owner-operators, and construction firms benefit from OpenRoads’ connected data environment—enabled through ProjectWise— to access, store, share, and manage all project data and models, from concept through construction, for information mobility across disciplines and in the field. OpenRoads takes advantage of a connected data environment’s Component Center to enable rapid and consistent modeling for every project, owner, or contractor.

%$Linker: 2 Internal <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-16"?><dictionary /> 2 23772 0 oLinkInternal <span class="redarrow">All Press Releases</span> Press Releases false /road-construction-software/press-releases/ true false%>

Related Content

  • Mobile mapping innovation
    June 1, 2022
    There are millions of kilometres of roads and features that need to be mapped in today’s world. We see a strong vision and application for the future, therefore Leica Geosystems, part of Hexagon, recently announced the introduction of the reality capture mobile mapping system Leica Pegasus TRK, introducing artificial intelligence, autonomous workflows and intuitive interfaces. This technology goes beyond the capabilities of what’s already been done, making it the perfect companion for today’s mobile mapping requirements.
  • Topcon and Bentley: integration between MAGNET 4.0 and ProjectWise
    June 7, 2016
    Topcon Positioning Group and Bentley Systems have set up direct communication between Bentley’s design applications and Topcon mobile work force products with the upcoming MAGNET 4.0 release. With the direct communication from MAGNET Enterprise to Bentley’s ProjectWise, users of Topcon’s family of MAGNET and 3D-MC software solutions can now, while working in the field, access or receive i-models created by Bentley’s OpenRoads design modeling technology. By the end of June, survey data and as-built
  • Bentley developing software portfolio with new acquisition
    January 14, 2015
    Software specialist Bentley Systems continues to develop its engineering software portfolio, this time with the acquisition of the UK-based firm C3global. This move brings Bentley the web-based Amulet software for operational analytics. From a product portfolio perspective, it complements Bentley’s AssetWise platform, which serves configuration management, asset health monitoring, inspection, maintenance, and compliance for infrastructure assets. The move means AssetWise will deliver additional actionable i
  • Infrastructure intelligence plays key role in construction
    October 13, 2023
    Infrastructure intelligence is playing a key role in construction.