SITEOPS: Applying Optimization Technology to Site Design
AECbytes "Building the Future" Article
March 31, 2008

Autodesk is proud to sponsor “Building the Future,” which provides guidance monthly on key industry trends and the application of new technologies. Because, like Autodesk, this section’s insights will help industry practitioners realize their ideas.

In keeping with the “looking ahead” theme of the AECbytes Building the Future series, this issue takes a look at the application of a sophisticated computational technology to a specific aspect of AEC: the design and development of a building site. The technology is called evolutionary computing, and it is a subset of the field of artificial intelligence that involves combinatorial optimization problems, where optimization is the process of finding the most effective solutions to a problem given a set of constraints. Optimization techniques are being used in many industries such as financial services, pharmaceuticals, automotive engineering, national security, and so on to develop more intelligent and sophisticated problem-solving applications related to those fields.

The application that has been developed to apply this technology to the field of site design and land development is called SITEOPS. It was publicly released in May 2007 by BLUERIDGE Analytics, a start-up company that was founded in 2003 and is based in Charlotte, North Carolina. The product has already gained a lot of traction, and is being adopted by a wide variety of clients, including retailers such as Lowe’s Companies and Target, land developers such as The Crown Companies and Deaton Development Consultants, and a large number of civil engineering firms including Woolpert, Langan Engineering and Environmental Services, MESH Consulting, Freeland & Kauffman, Southern Civil Engineers, Upham, Lincks & Associates, and Bohler Engineering. Let’s explore the application and get a better understanding of how it applies optimization technology for site design. In the process, we can also think about how this technology could potentially be applied to other design problems in AEC.

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