Traditional site development is a time consuming process which involves a lot of implicit knowledge, manual work and trial and error. Specialists are forced to spend their time on manual work and important aspects of proposed development may be overlooked. The Norwegian startup Spacemaker was founded on the idea of digitizing this process and providing computational decision support.
The OptiSite project developed algorithms and methods supporting this highly innovative approach to support and automation for property development. The results were achieved by bringing together expertise from a range of fields including architecture, mathematical modeling, simulation and optimization.
Many of the R&D results from the project were implemented in the product already during the project period, and the knowledge obtained is expected to be useful also in the future. The developed results are useful both to site developers and regulatory authorities and can be used for several different degrees of automation, depending on the application context.
Around the time of the project ending Spacemaker was acquired by Autodesk, and the product is now known as Autodesk Forma: www.autodesk.com/products/forma/overview.