Edmonton’s transportation planning has moved from episodic forecasting to continuous, operational-grade simulation after the City partnered with Bentley Systems to deploy OpenPaths DYNAMEQ and OpenPaths EMME in a citywide dynamic traffic assignment (DTA) program—one of the most ambitious municipal-scale DTA efforts reported in Canada. The rollout replaces brittle, static traffic studies with a consistent, simulation-driven platform that models individual vehicles, lane changes, signal interactions, and multimodal effects to inform capital investments, signal timing strategies, and corridor-level operational decisions. This transition promises faster, more defensible planning, and clearer visualization for stakeholders—but it also brings new technical, governance, and procurement challenges cities must manage carefully.
Edmonton’s move to an OpenPaths-powered DTA grew from practical need. Traditional four-step or static assignment models are useful for long-range planning but struggle to represent time-varying congestion, route diversion, and operational interventions like signal priority or lane closures. The City sought a toolset that could analyze project impacts both locally—at intersections and corridors—and citywide, under realistic driver-routing behavior and time-of-day dynamics. Bentley’s OpenPaths suite (which includes EMME for demand modeling and DYNAMEQ for DTA/simulation) offered the integrated, off‑the‑shelf platform Edmonton required. The vendor and regional writeups describe the result as a consistent platform for operational traffic planning across the entire region.
Edmonton’s program has been positioned by local reporting as supporting a major transportation planning investment; one news item referenced a planning envelope of roughly CAD 1 billion tied to a new transportation master plan. That CAD 1 billion figure is reported in trade coverage but does not appear in a formal City of Edmonton budget release discovered during the reporting for this feature; treat that dollar figure as reported by media but not yet corroborated in municipal budget documents. Where budget scale matters to procurement or risk assessment, the municipal financial plan or council reports should be consulted directly.
The broader Bentley ecosystem—iTwin, Cesium-based visualization, and Infrastructure AI initiatives—also intersects with mobility modeling. Cities that link network simulation to digital-twin platforms can animate infrastructure projects, quantify construction phasing impacts, and align traffic mitigation with construction sequencing. That integrated approach yields operationally actionable insight but demands cross-departmental coordination between transportation, public works, IT, and cybersecurity teams.
That promise comes with important caveats: DTA requires disciplined data strategy, guarded procurement to protect portability and transparency, and mature governance to manage cyber and operational risks. Cities planning similar moves should start small, require exportable artifacts and acceptance testing, and budget for the ongoing compute and staffing commitments that turn a pilot into a dependable city service. Done right, simulation-led planning can reduce unnecessary capital expense, improve multimodal outcomes, and make traffic planning a continuous, data-driven part of urban governance rather than an occasional, defensible exercise.
Source: Construction & Property News Canada Taps Bentley Systems’ OpenPaths to Revolutionize Citywide Traffic Modeling - Construction & Property News
Background
Edmonton’s move to an OpenPaths-powered DTA grew from practical need. Traditional four-step or static assignment models are useful for long-range planning but struggle to represent time-varying congestion, route diversion, and operational interventions like signal priority or lane closures. The City sought a toolset that could analyze project impacts both locally—at intersections and corridors—and citywide, under realistic driver-routing behavior and time-of-day dynamics. Bentley’s OpenPaths suite (which includes EMME for demand modeling and DYNAMEQ for DTA/simulation) offered the integrated, off‑the‑shelf platform Edmonton required. The vendor and regional writeups describe the result as a consistent platform for operational traffic planning across the entire region. Edmonton’s program has been positioned by local reporting as supporting a major transportation planning investment; one news item referenced a planning envelope of roughly CAD 1 billion tied to a new transportation master plan. That CAD 1 billion figure is reported in trade coverage but does not appear in a formal City of Edmonton budget release discovered during the reporting for this feature; treat that dollar figure as reported by media but not yet corroborated in municipal budget documents. Where budget scale matters to procurement or risk assessment, the municipal financial plan or council reports should be consulted directly.
What is Bentley OpenPaths and why it matters
OpenPaths in brief
OpenPaths is Bentley Systems’ integrated mobility simulation platform. The suite bundles multiple modules:- OpenPaths EMME — strategic and multimodal travel demand modeling and forecasting.
- OpenPaths DYNAMEQ — traffic simulation and dynamic traffic assignment (DTA), capable of mesoscopic-to-microscopic simulation and high-performance animations.
- OpenPaths AGENT, CUBE, CityPhi — demand synthesis, scenario management, and enriched visualization/analytics in the full OpenPaths ecosystem.
Key technical capabilities relevant to Edmonton’s project
- Microsimulation-style behavior: DYNAMEQ simulates individual vehicle interactions using car-following, lane-changing, and gap-acceptance models, producing realistic route diversion and queue formation. That capacity is precisely what city planners need when analyzing signal timing changes, corridor diversions, or lane reassignments.
- City-scale DTA: OpenPaths scales to metropolitan-sized networks and supports time-varying demand and signal interactions—allowing a single model to examine both corridor operations and system-wide routing responses.
- High-fidelity visualization: The platform supports high-performance 3D animations, enabling production-quality storyboards and 360° visualization that help councils and the public understand how proposed changes affect movements across space and time.
- Data fusion and automated calibration: OpenPaths AGENT and OpenPaths’ automated calibration workflows let cities ingest traffic counts, transit boarding data, household surveys, and big mobility datasets to re-calibrate models more frequently than legacy approaches allowed—an important capability for adapting to post‑pandemic travel patterns. Edmonton reported measurable runtime and responsiveness gains after migrating parts of its travel model into the OpenPaths ecosystem.
Edmonton’s deployment — what the case study shows
Edmonton’s program used OpenPaths EMME for demand and OpenPaths DYNAMEQ for the DTA/simulation layer. According to vendor case material and reporting, the city created a calibrated, citywide traffic simulation that planners now use for operational planning and project assessment. The local wins cited include:- Operational decision support across planning, design, and construction phases—enabling planners to test mitigation strategies before physical works begin.
- Timeline and cost savings by adopting an off‑the‑shelf integrated platform rather than bespoke toolchains that require significant integration and custom coding.
- Multimodal analysis, including assessing LRT signal priority and regional corridor impacts to ensure proposed changes support the city’s modal-shift goals.
- Integration with regional travel models to support long-term scenario testing and capacity planning.
Technical verification and specifications
To support municipal adoption the following technical points were checked and verified against vendor documentation and recent case materials:- OpenPaths supports 64‑bit Windows desktop/server environments, and the vendor lists recommended hardware tiers from base workstations up to high-performance servers with GPUs for large models and 3D rendering. Minimum practical configurations start around 16 GB RAM for entry-level use; large-region modeling benefits from 32–128 GB+ RAM and NVIDIA-class GPUs for visualization workloads. These system recommendations are important inputs for IT procurement and total cost of ownership estimates.
- The DYNAMEQ engine is explicitly designed for DTA and traffic simulation at metropolitan scale, including features to import networks from common transport data formats and to produce time-sliced, route-assignment outputs. That functionality was described in Bentley’s product pages and corroborated by vendor blogs detailing city case studies.
- Automated calibration and data-fusion workflows were used in Edmonton to incorporate current traffic counts, transit ridership, and household survey data; vendor materials report measurable runtime improvements and faster re-calibration cycles compared with the legacy Python-based systems Edmonton previously used. Those performance claims come from vendor case studies and internal reports from the city’s modeling team. They should be validated in procurement through vendor-supplied benchmarks and acceptance tests.
Strengths: why this approach delivers value
- Realistic, operational insight: DTA captures route-shifting and temporal bottlenecks that static assignment misses, improving the realism of mitigation strategies and demand-management scenarios.
- Faster scenario iteration: Integrated demand + DTA workflows and automated calibration allow more frequent model refreshes, enabling planners to test alternatives quickly as land use or travel behavior changes. Reports from the City of Edmonton show meaningful runtime and responsiveness gains after re-platforming key model components.
- Better stakeholder communication: 3D animations and production-quality visualizations make technical results accessible to council members, the public, and partners—reducing the “black box” problem that often undermines trust in modeling outputs.
- Multimodal and policy-aware: OpenPaths supports multimodal network definitions and transit interactions, enabling evaluation of LRT priority, bus rapid transit, active-transport interventions, and equity or emissions-focused metrics within the same framework.
- Off-the-shelf stability: Using a commercially supported platform reduces the long-term overhead of maintaining custom scripts and fragile integrations, and allows the city to benefit from vendor-supplied updates, community best practices, and training materials.
Risks, limitations and governance issues
Adopting a citywide, simulation-driven DTA program brings measurable benefits, but city leaders must confront a set of practical risks and trade-offs.Data quality and model inputs
DTA is data-hungry. The accuracy of diversion behavior, queue formation, and time-of-day congestion patterns depends on clean, consistent network geometry, accurate signal timing, representative origin-destination matrices, and calibrated demand profiles. Cities that underinvest in data hygiene—sensor calibration, loop-count processing, consistent map attribution—will see model outputs that are precise but not necessarily accurate. Establish data‑quality gates and routine sensor-validation processes before large-scale reliance on simulated outputs.Calibration and validation
Automated calibration tools speed work, but they require sensible targets and human oversight. Overfitting to particular count sets or ignoring travel-behavior shifts (telework, micro-mobility) can produce models that match historic counts but fail under new conditions. Maintain independent validation tests—holdout counts, travel-time comparisons, and cross-checks with third-party data sources (GPS traces, toll data) to ensure robust forecasts.Compute, licensing, and procurement costs
City-scale DTA with high-resolution microsimulation requires compute resources and GPU-enabled workstations for animation rendering. Licensing fees, training, and model maintenance budgets must be planned for the medium-to-long term. Vendor case studies show project-level cost savings, but procurement documents should require clear TCO analysis, performance SLAs, and acceptance testing against benchmarks.Vendor lock-in and portability
While Bentley emphasizes openness in parts of its stack, deep integration with proprietary model files and bespoke calibration procedures creates migration friction. Cities should insist on contractual terms that require exportable model artifacts, documented APIs, and data portability so future migration or multi-supplier strategies remain possible. Procurement should require demonstrable export/import tests and versioned model artifacts as part of the acceptance criteria.Cybersecurity and operational resilience
Traffic models increasingly feed operational systems (signal control, traveler information). Any integration with OT or field-control systems raises cyber risk. Treat model servers and data stores as operationally sensitive assets: segment networks, enforce strong IAM and MFA, secure backups, and include incident response clauses in vendor contracts. Public owners must evaluate whether model outputs will be used to automate operational changes and require explicit human-in-loop sign-off for any safety-critical actions.Public transparency and governance
Decisions guided by simulation require clear documentation of assumptions, scenario definitions, and uncertainty. Publish model-usage summaries, sensitivity tests, and simplified dashboards to show how results vary under reasonable assumption changes. This transparency reduces political risk and improves community trust.How other agencies have used DTA—and what Edmonton’s work mirrors
Canadian and international agencies are adopting DTA for similar reasons: the need to represent time-varying congestion and operational responses. The Regional Municipality of York and other regions have used DYNAMEQ-style DTA to avoid unnecessary capital widening, accelerate operational interventions, and produce nomination-worthy projects for professional awards. Academic work has also used DYNAMEQ-based simulations derived from Edmonton datasets to test sensor placement and network performance metrics, indicating that the city’s DTA outputs are already informing technical research. These convergent examples show a pattern: DTA is moving from niche corridor tools to standard city-scale operational planning tools.Practical recommendations for municipalities considering the same path
- Start with a bounded, high-value pilot. Choose a corridor or cluster of corridors with good sensor coverage and measurable KPIs (delay, travel time variability, transit on-time performance).
- Define data‑quality gates and an ownership model. Specify who owns O-D matrices, loop-count processing, signal timing inputs, and model-version control.
- Require exportability and open APIs in procurement documents. Include acceptance tests that demonstrate import/export to alternative platforms.
- Budget for compute and staffing. Plan for GPU-enabled analysis workstations, server capacity, and staff time to maintain and re-calibrate the model.
- Insist on transparency: publish scenario assumptions, calibration reports, and sensitivity analyses to support council decisions.
- Build human-centred governance: require human sign-off for any operational change triggered by model outputs; define escalation procedures and audit trails.
Longer-term outlook and integration: ABM, climate, and digital twins
OpenPaths’ roadmap and recent product releases emphasize stronger integration between demand-side agent-based modeling (ABM) and DTA—allowing cities to move from aggregate, zone-level demand to individual-level agents feeding DTA. Edmonton’s migration of its Personal Travel Model into OpenPaths AGENT is an example of this trend: more granular demand inputs increase the realism of DTA responses to policy levers such as transit fare changes, telework scenarios, and micromobility adoption. These capabilities make DTA a convergent node within a city’s broader digital-twin and climate-planning initiatives, enabling planners to test emissions, equity, and access metrics within the same modeling framework—but they also require mature data governance and compute planning.The broader Bentley ecosystem—iTwin, Cesium-based visualization, and Infrastructure AI initiatives—also intersects with mobility modeling. Cities that link network simulation to digital-twin platforms can animate infrastructure projects, quantify construction phasing impacts, and align traffic mitigation with construction sequencing. That integrated approach yields operationally actionable insight but demands cross-departmental coordination between transportation, public works, IT, and cybersecurity teams.
Conclusion
Edmonton’s adoption of Bentley OpenPaths DYNAMEQ and EMME for a citywide DTA model marks a pragmatic shift from episodic, static studies to continuous, operational simulation. The approach delivers more realistic modeling of diversion, queueing, and multimodal impacts—and it speeds scenario iteration while improving the clarity of stakeholder communication through high‑fidelity visualization. Vendor case material and academic work show measurable runtime and operational benefits, and Edmonton’s project sits alongside other Canadian DTA programs that are already influencing policy and project delivery.That promise comes with important caveats: DTA requires disciplined data strategy, guarded procurement to protect portability and transparency, and mature governance to manage cyber and operational risks. Cities planning similar moves should start small, require exportable artifacts and acceptance testing, and budget for the ongoing compute and staffing commitments that turn a pilot into a dependable city service. Done right, simulation-led planning can reduce unnecessary capital expense, improve multimodal outcomes, and make traffic planning a continuous, data-driven part of urban governance rather than an occasional, defensible exercise.
Source: Construction & Property News Canada Taps Bentley Systems’ OpenPaths to Revolutionize Citywide Traffic Modeling - Construction & Property News
