A range of key software innovations are now available for road construction applications from various suppliers - Adrian Greeman writes. Two significant and highly economic alternatives are now available to the major CAD providers both from Belgium and both offering interesting features. First is Pythagoras, which describes itself as a modern CAD program specially designed for topographical applications which include land surveying, road design and city planning.
A sophisticated street lighting control system using technology from Mayrise and Telensa will reduce running costs and boost efficiency in the UK city of Conventry
A range of key software innovations are now available for road construction applications from various suppliers - Adrian Greeman writes
Two significant and highly economic alternatives are now available to the major CAD providers both from Belgium and both offering interesting features.First is
Pythagoras says it integrates the calculation and drawing functions required for these tasks and comes in a variety of modules; a basic unit CAD + GIS allows CAD and drawing with coordinate geometry functions. A geocoding module imports survey data and generates drawings automatically based on the point codes used in the field.
Other modules provide DTM capacities and road design.
The CAD capacities include 2D and 3D but until recently there was no functionality to allow the user to rotate the 3D image according to Jan van Looy at the company's base in Vosselaar. That has now been added in a newly launched macro application for the CAD system which links it to Google's Sketch-up program, tapping the latter's capabilities.
A number of other mainly mapping function macros are available and users can also write their own programming additions to Pythagoras if they buy the Pro module which offers Visual Basic.
Meanwhile Belgium is also home to
Because of this and a major effort to maintain a wide international base for users and third-party developers, the program has established itself as an alternative platform for a variety of additional functions. "More than 160 third party applications are available," said Scheiris, which makes it a good alternative solution.
Meanwhile recent announcements in the third party arena include
These include LandARCH Professional for external architecture, landscape design and irrigation, which is offered with impressive 2D and 3D libraries and allows applied materials for fast, photo-realistic render results. The application can also create comprehensive schedules and a bill of materials from drawing data. GlobalCAD Terrain is for site survey producing 3D terrain models with a single mouse click. Intelligent survey point markers automatically update XYZ values to suit new locations. GlobalCAD Organizer, GlobalCAD Schedule and Hatch Manager complete the GlobalCAD product suite.
Bricscad has been working on the issue of solid modelling and it launched a special Platinum version for Windows which enables 3D parametric solid modeling in the .dwg environment.
Six new tool pallets allow primitives such as box, cylinder, cone, sphere, torus and wedge which can be extruded, revolved and swept. By combining them with union, subtract, intersect complex composites are made.
What the company calls its X-Solids environment captures the history of solids as they are created, allowing parametric editing at any time, even primitives have been combined. Primitives within composites can be moved, copied, rotated, deleted and so on while still within the composite solid.
These capacities are yet available for the Linux version, but the fact that there is a Linux version is a testament to the Bricsys philosophy of broadening its base. The company says it is fixing some problems that had occurred in the V10, the first one for Linux, which has already proved very popular as for the first time Linux users could have a .dwg format program. The V11 has improved the LISP support which allows third-party programs to use it; ten have been added so far.
The company is also changing its Windows BRX API to suit Linux. This is used by some 500 application developers to port AutoCAD based applications to Bricscad and will give access to the Linux platform.
Bricys has also created a kind of CAD specific social network, along the lines of Facebook, allowing discussion forums, news postings and user profiling.
Contractor management
Contractors can simplify the user interface by changing menu and toolbar layouts. New layouts can be chosen according to tasks such as field data, data preparation, takeoff, construction, and construction plus survey. There are also improved Workflow Guides which take new users through typical workflows. All the needed steps and commands are followed in the right order.
Trimble has also integrated file types and data types used in its other products such as those for GCS900 grade control systems,
Smart lights for Coventry
A first major use of remotely controlled streetlighting is being implemented in Coventry in the UK. Each light is connected by radio to a central control centre which will be able to tailor the lighting along particular routes for city events like football matches, or dim the light in certain areas to save costs when the day dawns bright for example.The system will also allow automated fault reporting on lights and overall better asset management. It works with a
The installation of the system is part of work being carried out by
The system aims to reduce light pollution and provide significant reductions in energy consumption and carbon emissions. Balfour Beatty is already responsible for more than 115,000 street lights and signs within its existing PFI projects in Sunderland, South Tyneside and Derby.
Roundabout software
A particularly useful new capacity could be a real time link from roundabout layout design to the well-known empirical traffic analysis tool Arcady fromThe program's Junction module has been written to give an almost instantaneous indication of the effect of design changes on the traffic capacities and flows of the roundabout. Savoy and TRL's own programmers have worked in conjunction on the module with a new modified 7.1 version of Arcady released at the same time to allow the connection.
"The tool firstly allows a roundabout or junction to be designed in accordance with national design standards, setting the radius, geometry, approaches and so forth," explained marketing manager Simon Ayers. At present the program comes with US and UK standards though others will be added and the user can define standards.
Variations on the design can then be explored, and those which exceed standards are flagged up to allow the designer scope to justify them. Each change can be quickly examined for junction traffic effects according to Ayers, "...which short circuits a previously long winded process of designing the roundabout, exporting the parameters to another engineer using the traffic tools and then re-working the design." ARCADY 7 provides results such as RFC, Level of Service and values of queues and delays which are all displayed in AutoTrack
and updated in real time as changes to geometry are made. In the past many iterations that could be needed might take days of cycling between two computers whereas the immediate feedback now can cut that to a matter of hours.
