EXTON, Pa.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Feb 5, 2026--
Bentley Systems, Incorporated (Nasdaq: BSY), the infrastructure engineering software company, announced today the Alabama Department of Transportation (ALDOT) is using Bentley’s Blyncsy solution to enhance its existing performance-based budgeting process for highway maintenance. ALDOT adopted a performance-based budgeting model more than 15 years ago and continues to refine its implementation to ensure maintenance funds are allocated based on objective, data-driven insights.
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Historically, collecting asset condition data across Alabama’s 11,000 miles of roadway network has required significant manual effort and resources. While ALDOT has long employed a data-driven statewide survey, traditional methods, such as manual inspections, are labor-intensive and can introduce inconsistencies. To improve efficiency and accuracy, ALDOT is incorporating Blyncsy’s automated AI analytics into its established process, providing a faster and more consistent assessment of specific designated roadway assets.
Blyncsy, part of Bentley’s Asset Analytics portfolio, uses crowdsourced high-resolution dash camera imagery from vehicles and applies AI to automatically analyze roadway conditions. This provides a consistent, empirical assessment of critical assets, such as guardrails and signage to name a few, across the entire roadway network. A previous pilot project demonstrated that Blyncsy’s AI models achieved 97% accuracy, providing the reliable data foundation required for precise financial planning.
“To strengthen our performance-based budgeting, we need consistent, quantified data to produce condition assessments across all districts,” said Morgan Musick, Assistant Maintenance Management Engineer at ALDOT. “Bentley’s Blyncsy solution helps us enhance our existing statewide survey by automating certain asset inspections. This technology helps to give us an objective snapshot of our roadway network, enabling us to adjust budgets based on actual asset conditions and ensure funding goes to appropriate maintenance activities in order to better reach a target Level of Service for each asset.”
Mark Pittman, senior director of Transportation AI at Bentley Systems, added, “The future of infrastructure asset management depends on making financial decisions based on empirical evidence rather than historical precedent. By integrating AI-powered asset inspection into its performance-based budgeting process, ALDOT is setting a new standard for data-driven infrastructure planning.”
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About Bentley Systems
Around the world, infrastructure professionals rely on software from Bentley Systems to help them design, build, and operate better and more resilient infrastructure for transportation, water, energy, cities, and more. Founded in 1984 by engineers for engineers, Bentley is the partner of choice for engineering firms and owner-operators worldwide, with software that spans engineering disciplines, industry sectors, and all phases of the infrastructure lifecycle. Through our digital twin solutions, we help infrastructure professionals unlock the value of their data to transform project delivery and asset performance.
© 2026 Bentley Systems, Incorporated. Bentley, the Bentley logo, and Blyncsy are either registered or unregistered trademarks or service marks of Bentley Systems, Incorporated or one of its direct or indirect wholly owned subsidiaries. All other brands and product names are trademarks of their respective owners.
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Alabama DOT is using Blyncsy from Bentley Systems to enhance its existing performance-based budgeting process for highway maintenance. (Image courtesy of Bentley Systems)
TEL AVIV (AP) — Feel the rhythm, feel the rhyme. Get on up, Israel, it's bobsled time!
A handful of diverse athletes — a pole-vaulter, sprinter, shot-putter, rugby player, and former Olympian in skeleton — will compete as Israel's first bobsled team during this year's Milan Cortina Winter Games, unlikely ambassadors of their diplomatically isolated nation.
Most of these guys had never touched a sled before this season. Their leader, AJ Edelman, is believed to be the first Orthodox Jew to ever compete in a Winter Games. Another founding member of the team, Ward Farwaseh, will likely to be the first Druze Olympian.
Their participation comes at a time when Israel’s presence in international sports has been met with boycotts, bans and backlash over the humanitarian toll of the war in Gaza, which has killed more than 71,800 Palestinians, according to the territory’s health ministry, and devastated the strip.
The athletes say they are proud to represent Israel. They hope to be role models for young Israeli athletes and lay the groundwork for future gold in the sport.
“I used to be at the bottom of the pack athletically, and I made it here to the Olympics, so there must be some self-selection process,” said Edelman, speaking to AP from Italy. “I’m very sure that with this program now — with the infrastructure that has been set up — Israel will become a force in bobsled.”
As for how Edelman describes his long journey to Italy?
He puts his own spin on the 1993 movie “Cool Runnings,” based somewhat on the Jamaican bobsled team's Olympic team from 1988. Using the Yiddish word for synagogue, he says he is thinking of this one as “Shul Runnings.”
In 2014, a skeleton scout told Edelman, an American-Israeli from Brookline, Massachusetts with scoliosis and poor balance, that he was “no Tom Brady.” Defiant, the young Edelman took to YouTube, watching hours of tutorials and managing to qualify for the 2018 Olympics. He finished 28th of 30. Then began his headlong effort to bring a bobsled team together for the 2022 Games.
“It’s very tough for me to understand what would compel anyone else to want to get inside of basically a trash can and get kicked off the side of a mountain. Who does that?” he said.
He spammed the roster of Israel’s rugby team with Instagram messages. He eventually reached Fawarseh, from the Druze city of Majhar in northern Israel. There are just one million Druze, including 115,000 in Israel and 25,000 in the Golan Heights, which Israel captured from Syria in the 1967 Mideast War and annexed in 1981.
Fawarseh had initially ignored Edelman's message, thinking it had to be a scam. Eventually he relented, joining with four others.
“I didn’t believe it. I didn’t even know that there was a Winter Olympics before, until I met AJ,” he said.
The team fell 0.1 second short of qualifying for Beijing so they set their sights on 2026.
Then, a week before the team was supposed to kick off its qualification run, Hamas attacked Israel, killing around 1,200 people and dragging some 250 hostages to Gaza. Israel vowed retaliation, drafting most of Edelman's teammates.
Fawarseh and Edelman put out a new call for athletes, pulling in Israeli shot-putter Menachem Chen, sprinter Omer Katz, pole vaulter Uri Zisman and Itamar Shprinz, a crossfit athlete, as coach.
Shprinz needed one important clarification before agreeing: What exactly was bobsledding?
"I knew in the back of my head it was something about sleds and winter sports, but not what you needed to do in the sport,” he said.
Two days later, Shprinz had a ticket to Europe, then Canada, where he first rode in the sled : “It was terrible, I passed out. It’s a hard sport."
The team clinched an Olympic spot at Lake Placid last month.
Israel is sending five other athletes to the Games, with figure skater Maria Seniuk, skiers Noa Szollos and Barnabas Szollos, cross-country skier Atila Mihaly Kertesz and skeleton athlete Jared Firestone joining the bobsledders.
“Leave in peace and return in peace,” wrote Yael Arad, chair of the Israel Olympic Committee and member of the International Olympic Committee, in a letter to Israeli Olympians this year. “You are carrying the torch of generations of Jewish and Israeli sports tradition, and every time you wave the Israeli flag, do so in the name of those who dreamed and did not arrive, those who are in our hearts forever.”
There were calls for Israeli athletes to be treated like their Russian counterparts, made to compete as “Individual Neutral Athletes," banned from wearing any national symbols or hearing anthems upon victory. The International Olympic Committee has said the legal reasons for acting against Russia have not been reached in Israel’s case, without explaining its reasoning.
“There was an athlete who told us in the summer that he would never represent Israel because ‘you don’t kill children.’ We’ve always known that those sentiments exist,” Edelman said. “On the team, we don’t modify the behavior too much. We’re proud.”
“My mom says to me, ‘Isn’t it dangerous that you’ll have a star of David on your back?’” Zisman added. “I say, no mom, that’s what we do. We do the best we can.”
AP Winter Olympics: https://apnews.com/hub/milan-cortina-2026-winter-olympics
FILE- Adam Edelman and Regnars Kirejevs, of Israel, compete in their second run during the two-man bobsled at the bobsledding world championships, Saturday, March 8, 2025, in Lake Placid, N.Y. (AP Photo/Julia Demaree Nikhinson, File)
Members of Israel's bobsledding team, from left, Uri Zisman, Omer Katz, AJ Edelman, Ward Farwaseh, Itamar Shprinz, pose at the Israel Olympic Committee headquarters, Wednesday, Jan. 28, 2026, in Tel Aviv, Israel, before their departure for the 2026 Winter Olympics. (AP Photo/Julia Frankel)
