Road design gets some 3-D help

8220;It is a pathbreaking software that works very well for a client. In easy simple steps it helps design roads for virgin alignments or even upgrading/widening of existing roads. So much so that even a layman can help design the road. Earlier software in use was difficult to understand and needed well-trained engineers. The interesting aspect is that it suggests various alignments one can choose from and then draws up cost estimates for all of them,8221; says Venkat Ramana Shilla, Principal Engineer, Scott Wilson Kirkpatrick India Ltd.

He adds that they had used the software for designing of the Hyderabad-Vijayawada and Vijayawada-Machlipatnam sections on NH 9 that are part of the North-South corridor of the National Highways Development Programme NHDP. 8220;Now we are in the process of using it for a massive 3,400-km-long stretch in Karnataka,8221; says Shilla.

MX Roads was put to use to design a wider, four-lane road along NH 1A in J-K with just two engineers on the job. The software helped find just the right alignment in 38 km of hazardous hilly terrain. Other successes have been planning a 41-km-long ring road around Bangalore, a 270-km, six-lane Eastern Peripheral Expressway around Delhi, and a 300-km-long road network around Srinagar, 1,600 m above sea level.

Jugal Makwana , Bentley8217;s Industry Sales Director of Transportation, says the software also helps cut down costs. 8220;By using MX Roads, the cost of the project in case of the Vijayawada-Hyderabad and Vijayawada-Machlipatnam stretches on NH 9 was cut down to 15 per cent. In the Srinagar project, the 3D designing helped shave off some eight months from the project schedule. The software helps reduce time taken in detailed designing of roads by 60 per cent. By using MX Roads, we came up with digital terrain models DTMs to visualise terrain and slip zones prone to rock slides on NH 1A in the Srinagar-Banihal area,8221;says Makhwana.

He adds that the software can do much more. 8220; MX Roads has been selected as the platform to develop software to see what energy saving can be done on a statistically viable basis on various road types, single carriageways, dual carriageways and motorways both in road construction and by vehicles using the roads. This project is currently being done for the European Union but can be easily implemented in India to ensure that thousands of kilometres of roads are designed as energy-efficient and help reduce cost to operate vehicles,8221;adds Makhwana.