Waterford County Council in Ireland has won a BE Award for
integrating the measurement of energy usage during road construction
and operation into road design and route selection. Other project
participants included roads, energy, geotechnical and software experts
from the Czech Republic, France, Ireland, the Netherlands, Portugal,
Sweden, and the United Kingdom.
The goal was to develop customized software that can automatically
calculate the amount of energy used during road construction and
operation. The software would be employed at the preliminary design or
route selection stage of new projects to ensure that only the most
efficient construction methods and roadway designs are used. Five
proposed road schemes were evaluated during the project using the
newly developed software.
The software produced, JouleSAVE, was developed by Bentley
Professional Services and works with Bentley MXROAD. It allows
engineers to automatically quantify energy requirements for all phases
of road construction and to evaluate the energy that will be used by
vehicles traveling on the road. Different routes being considered can
then be compared in terms of energy use.
Commenting on the team's decision to use Bentley MXROAD in its
custom solution, Elizabeth Kennedy, executive engineer with Waterford
County Council, said, "We considered Bentley MXROAD to be the most
widely used road design software package internationally. Since the
software developed through this project may have widespread use, it
was decided that MXROAD would be the most appropriate software to
use."
The energy used during road construction is obtained by breaking
down the works into their constituent items. The energy values are
then calculated for each item in terms of off-site materials (the
energy required to produce materials such as aggregate, concrete, and
bitumen) and on-site placement (the energy required to excavate,
transport, and place materials). These values are then used by
JouleSAVE to calculate the total energy required for the construction
of each road design being considered.
When interfaced with the Swedish National Road and Transport
Research Institute's VETO 2000 software, which estimates road traffic
fuel consumption and exhaust emissions, JouleSAVE allows engineers to
analyze how each route option impacts the fuel usage of vehicles
traveling on the road over a design lifetime. Forecasted traffic
volumes and anticipated vehicle types are then input into the program.
Major aspects of the road design that impact vehicles' fuel usage
- such as horizontal or vertical geometry - are analyzed so that fuel
usage over the road's lifetime can be calculated for each route
option. This is achieved by importing the geometric design data via
JouleSAVE into the VETO program.
Two types of attribute data are input to make the appropriate
analysis: overall data and sectional data. The overall data will give
details of the vehicle category, macro texture of the road, and the
road conditions. The sectional data will give details of the speed,
speed limit, traffic volumes, stop time, super-elevation, and road
width for the various segments of the road.
"The software produced for this project enabled us to quickly,
easily, and reliably calculate the energy used during construction and
operation of each of our road designs, which allowed us to compare
them as part of the route selection process," said Kennedy. On
average, the project determined that energy used by the vehicles on
the roads over a 20-year period is 18 times greater than the energy
used in the road construction.
For more information on Waterford County Council's winning project
and all of the other BE Award projects, visit www.be.org/awards. For
more information on the Bentley products used in this project, visit
www.bentley.com/civil.
About the BE Awards of Excellence
The BE Awards of Excellence, which are selected by an independent
jury of industry experts and presented at an evening ceremony during
the annual BE Conference (www.be.org), honor the extraordinary work of
Bentley users improving the world's infrastructure. These projects set
benchmarks and showcase the imagination and technical mastery of the
organizations that created them.
About Waterford County Council
The mission of the Regional Design Office of Waterford County
Council is to provide a safe and efficient road network throughout the
south east of Ireland. This covers the counties of Waterford, Wexford,
Carlow, Kilkenny and South Tipperary with a combined population of
just over 460,000. For more information, visit www.waterfordcoco.ie
and www.thrdo.com.
About Bentley
Bentley Systems, Incorporated provides software for the lifecycle
of the world's infrastructure. The company's comprehensive portfolio
for the building, plant, civil, and geospatial verticals spans
architecture, engineering, construction (AEC) and operations. With
revenues now surpassing $400 million annually, and more than 2400
colleagues globally, Bentley is the leading provider of AEC software
to the Engineering News-Record Top Design Firms and major
owner-operators, and was named the world's No. 2 provider of
GIS/geospatial software solutions in a recent Daratech research study.
To receive Bentley press releases as they are issued, visit
www.bentley.com/bentleywire. For more information, visit
www.bentley.com. To view a copy of Bentley's May 2006 Annual Report
online, go to www.bentley.com/May2006annualreport.
Bentley, the "B" logo, BE, BE Awards of Excellence, and MXROAD are
either registered or unregistered trademarks or service marks of
Bentley Systems, Incorporated or one of its direct or indirect
wholly-owned subsidiaries. Other brands and product names are
trademarks of their respective owners.
