Introduction #
Handling long stretches of rural road projects can be quite a challenge. The engineers could be receiving ground-level information in the form of hundreds of thousands if not millions of survey points–courtesy of LIDAR data or data from Google Earth import– from the surveyors. And on top of that the engineers will have to design a long stretch of roads ranging from 20 km, which could result in many tens of thousands of platforms (or mesh triangles).
Such a heavy drawing can easily buckle the most advanced hardware (especially) if you are using Civil 3D, which is a huge resource hog even when the drawing is light and small. Therefore any competent road software must fully optimise the operations under the hood to provide a smooth experience for the users when they use the software to design the road.
MiTS 3 Performance enhancements #
A lot of work went into MiTS 3 to make the program snappy when running big projects with sub-million survey points and hundreds of thousands of road platforms.. After months of hard work, much has been improved, and the improvements can be categorized into two key sections:
- Road Modeling Operation – The optimization focuses on tasks such as adjusting alignments and modifying road offsets. The software now exhibits a high level of responsiveness in making changes to these elements of the design even when the road string is long
- Loading and Saving of Project Files – For large projects, the time required for these operations has been reduced, ensuring a more seamless and swift experience for users in accessing or storing project data.
The benchmark is done on a road project with 800K survey points, some 20km stretch of roads with hundreds of thousands of road platforms. The analysis was performed using a machine that is 5 years old, equipped with 16 GB RAM and an i5 processor.
Shown below is the detailed breakdown of some of the improvements introduced in our latest version, comparing it to the older version.
Road modeling operation #
The transition between features in Road Modules #
Operations | MiTS 2.9.72.0 | MiTS 3 |
Vertical Alignment to Horizontal Alignment | 5 minutes and 30.97 seconds | 2.39 seconds |
Vertical Alignment to Road Width | 4 minutes 52.82 seconds | 4.51 seconds |
Vertical Alignment to SuperElevation | 4 minutes 38.28 seconds | 2.30 seconds |
Horizontal Alignment to Vertical Alignment | 2 minutes 38.12 seconds | 0.75 seconds |
SuperElevation to Vertical Alignment | 3 minutes 0.85 seconds | 11.44 seconds |
Clickin on verification panel to go into alignment features | 6 minutes 11.21 seconds | 22.81 seconds |
Example Performance Comparison between MiTS 2 and MiTS 3 versions #
Editing of the road design elements #
Operations | MiTS 2.9.72.0 | MiTS 3 |
Road Width Elements | ||
Adding Carriageway | 3 minutes 53.30 seconds | 11.30 seconds |
Adding Drain Reserve | 42.76 seconds | 9.79 seconds |
Horizantal Line Elements | ||
Adding IP | 13.17 seconds | 7.22 seconds |
Delete IP | 18.16 seconds | 7.88 seconds |
Horizontal Curve Elements | ||
Changing Radius | 24.63 seconds | 4.14 seconds |
Changing Spiral Length (In) | 15.41 seconds | 5.44 seconds |
Changing Spiral Length (Out) | 20.46 seconds | 4.73 seconds |
Superelevation Elements | ||
Untick curve widening | 17.57 seconds | 6.30 seconds |
Tick curve widening | 17.56 seconds | 6.24 seconds |
Change curve widening width | 17.44 seconds | 9.41 seconds |
Changing SE percentage | 27.07 seconds | 7.82 seconds |
Example Performance Comparison between MiTS 2 and MiTS 3 versions #
Loading and saving of project file #
Operations | MiTS 2.9.72.0 | MiTS 3 |
Opening project file | 4 minutes 57.03 seconds | 54.69 seconds |
Home Button | 3 minutes 0.69 seconds | 1.83 seconds |
Saving project file | 3.65 seconds | 3.52 seconds |
Example Performance Comparison between MiTS 2 and MiTS 3 versions #
MiTS 3 vs. Civil 3D #
Additionally, performance evaluations of the same project file in both Civil 3D and MiTS 3 are included. It becomes evident that in MiTS 3, after the speed optimization, the operations of zooming, panning, and object selections exhibit faster speed.
Panning Operations #
Zooming Operations #
Object Selections #
Conclusion #
Speed optimization is an ongoing process. It is a sign of software maturity as the software is being stress-tested and being improved upon so that it can handle bigger and bigger projects. We are grateful that we have faithful users who are willing to use the software ( and bear with the sluggishness) and let us know the areas of improvement.
If you feel that some areas of MiTS can still be improved, do let us know!
I’m the Benevolent Dictator for Life for MiTS Software cum Editor of this website. Read more here.
You can also contact me at soonhui@mes100.com
