Road construction software innovations

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 2616 Pythagoras, which describes itself as a modern CAD program specially designed for topographical applications which include land surveying, road design and city planning.

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 2614 Bricsys, whose main product is Bricscad, now in V11. It offers a CAD tool at a fifth of the price of the mainstream products says creative director Sander Scheiris. It reads and writes .dwg format and offers high compatibility with AutoCAD he said.

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 2618 Tyco Fire Protection Products' SprinkCAD for Bricscad and range of applications from UK developer 2615 GlobalCAD which were originally developed on AutoCAD.

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

2122 Trimble's integrated contractor's data management system, Business Center - HCE, has been streamlined to make it easier to use and more efficient. The Business Center - HCE is for heavy and highway contractors primarily, with an emphasis on those us major earthmoving equipment. It bringing together various contractual tasks from contractor's working design and data preparation from the original consultants design, to quantities take-off and the integration of GPS and total station survey data. It also handles production of the data for machine control and helps route data for controllers and field crews.

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, 2294 CAT's Accugrade grade control system, and SCS 900 site controller software. The software now allows import and export of Trimble Terramodel files and is compatible with Trimble SiteVision Office and Cat AccuGrade Office data.

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 2619 Telensa remote connection system which is integrated into a 2606 Mayrise lighting management software system.

The installation of the system is part of work being carried out by 1146 Balfour Beatty under an overall €291 million (£250 million) PFI award from Coventry City Council. Over five years in the 25 year scheme some 38,000 light units will be replaced with remotely operated and energy efficient white lights, followed by a 20 year maintenance programme.

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 from 777 TRL, the British road research company. This is made possible in the new version 9.0 of the AutoTrack program from UK firm Savoy Computing.

The 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.