Savoy Computing and TRL join forces on software

24 November 2009, 1:52pm

24th November 2009 - Savoy Computing Services Ltd and the UK Transport Research Laboratory have joined forces to develop an innovative new system for designing roundabouts. The system links two market leading products,
AutoTrack and ARCADY, to reduce the time taken to design roundabouts.

AutoTrack Junctions is a totally new roundabout
design program that allows engineers to design
roundabout geometry interactively to selected UK or US standards. It allows users to model roundabouts with up to eight arms and caters for splitter islands, pedestrian crossings, rumble strips and traffic controls. Additional options let the user analyse driver and pedestrian sightlines, stopping distances and fastest line speed.

ARCADY is a long established roundabout flow/
capacity analysis system which assesses roundabout performance taking into account the geometry and placement of features such as pedestrian crossing. The system predicts, flow rates, queue times and various performance criteria. The recently released version 7 incorporates numerous improvements to the user interface.

Traditionally two people have been involved in roundabout design; one person responsible for the geometry (typically a road engineer) and another for the vehicle flow/capacity analysis (typically a traffic engineer).

The design process is then a matter of adjusting the geometry and re-analysing until both parties are happy.

By linking AutoTrack and ARCADY we are able to combine these two operations and reduce the time taken to produce efficient, well balanced roundabout designs. The link is initiated automatically from AutoTrack and thereafter the two programs talk seamlessly to each other ensuring that, whichever program is in use,
the data is synchronised with the other program. Values may be changed in either program and the data integrity will be preserved. The system runs in AutoCAD, MicroStation or standalone in Windows.

Savoy Director, Simon Ayers, is delighted with the result, “Roundabout design has historically been a highly iterative process. By linking these two programs we’ve been able to create a single interactive environment within which all the relevant design parameters are constantly updated, allowing the engineer to see immediately the effect of changes made to the geometry. In this way we have removed the iterative nature of the task and so reduced the design time, improved the design efficiency, and ultimately, reduced the cost. The result has exceeded even our
expectations”.

TRL Programme Director for Software, Gavin Jackman is equally enthusiastic, “It been a pleasure working with Savoy and the result is a product that takes BIM principles into the traffic engineer space and is set to revolutionise the way we work in the future.”.

The product is going to be showcased at Autodesk University in Las Vegas on the Savoy Computing stand (stand 109) and at TRB in Washington in January on the TRL stand.

Savoy Computing Services

TRL

Geo: International