Welcome to week two of our Spring Feature Release updates. This week, we're introducing enhancements to streamline your project planning and compliance processes. Our new features are designed to speed up the preparation and visualisation process, enabling quicker review and decision-making by your team, earlier in your project.

Read on for full details on these useful new tools, part of our biggest ever feature release.

Mitigate visual impacts before they emerge

Optioneer's latest feature, Visual Impact Assessment, automatically generates visual impact maps highlighting the locations from which proposed structures, like pylons, will be visible. This allows you to easily identify where view lines will be impacted by new infrastructure, considering factors like nearby homes or obstructions like hills.

To help guide planning, Optioneer also generates visual sensitivity maps, allowing you and your team to easily model visual sensitivity. With this addition, you can identify the routes with the least impact on sensitive areas to minimise the potential for social and environmental pushback at later stages, supporting more community-conscious development.

Why is this a game-changer?

• Optimise for visual impact: Strategically integrates visual impact and sensitivity into the routing and siting process, making it a key factor in decision-making.‍
• Early risk identification for mitigation: Enables an indicative assessment of visual impacts right at the start of the project when routing options are first being considered, preemptively reducing opposition by addressing potential concerns early on.‍
• Social responsibility: Promotes environmentally sensitive and socially responsible project proposals

Quickly identify and visualise crossing and tower impacts

The new Automated Crossings and Towers Schedule tool automatically compiles a table of crossings and towers that could affect a project, making it easy to see their potential impact at a glance.

It improves the ability to identify project risks by combining information about crossings and towers with live map links for instant visual analysis. Designed to simplify documentation, this feature centralises critical project analyses on a single platform, boosting project management efficiency.

Why is this a game-changer?

• Automated cataloguing: Provides a detailed list of crossings and towers to understand project landscapes and identify potential challenges easily.
• Visual integration: Enhances project visualisation with live map links and visual aids, helping with the identification and analysis of key project elements.‍
• Streamlined workflows: Centralises project documentation and analysis inside Optioneer, reducing context-switching and boosting user productivity.

Optimise project logistics with access track evaluation

Access Track Evaluation is a new feature that automatically identifies potential access routes for routing and siting projects to reduce the chance of access issues arising later. It offers a clear advantage for projects where access tracks could significantly influence critical factors like cost and biodiversity.

With the Access Track Evaluation tool, you can align a project’s trajectory closer to your objectives right from the start, ensuring a smoother path from inception to completion and reducing the chance of unforeseen risks arising in later stages.

Why is this a game-changer?

• Comprehensive environmental reporting: Incorporates access tracks as a component of routing and site selection with detailed reporting, enabling comprehensive analysis of project scenarios early in the project and reducing risk.
• Unified project oversight: Integrates access track analysis alongside main asset development for a unified view of all relevant factors.‍
• Enhanced decision-making capabilities: Provides advanced tools for scenario analysis and risk assessment, enabling more strategic planning and real-time project iteration capabilities.

Adding powerful automations like these to Optioneer allows early visibility of visual impacts, crossings, towers and access tracks. This foresight in the early stages of infrastructure planning enables teams to proactively tackle issues that often cause delays or disruptions in later stages.

With intuitive visualisation tools and the ability to update in real-time, project teams can simultaneously consider all aspects affecting a project, rather than addressing each element in isolation. This approach significantly accelerates the planning process, resulting in a solid, workable plan, less likely to suffer from costly delays at later stages due to public objections or access problems.

Check back in a week for our final instalment of features for the Spring Feature Release for Optioneer. We’ll tell you all about our new features to improve clarity and consensus with advanced visualisation tools, including 3D visualisation.