Incorporating Causeway's PDS Volumetrics, Alignment Design and Drainage Design packages, Site Developer has evolved to specifically meet the needs of professionals in the housing development sector.

Developed by engineers in the working environment, the software follows traditional design procedures but employs the latest string modelling and object programming technologies to offer a high degree of automation and in the generation of designs and design change. The use of object modelling is particularly relevant to site infrastructure projects where design change is common.

Taking the roads as an example. The horizontal and vertical designs combine to form a 'master' alignment. 'Features' such as carriageways, kerbs and footpaths are added. If a change affecting the horizontal or vertical (or both) designs occurs at any stage this obviously has a knock on effect on the 'features'. In this case the software will automatically regenerate all of the features to their correct position in terms of chainage, offset and level relative to the new design. This sounds a simple and obvious requirement but PDS is the only software to offer such a facility. It is due to these in-built relationships and intelligence that PDS is able to offer significant productivity improvements over traditional and CAD based methods.

The design engineer is quickly and easily able to build up a full 3-D model of the site to:

• Assess optimum building levels
• Design and check access, drive way and plot gradients
• Design roads to local authority standards (with in-built design parameters)
• Design car parking areas and check the drainage implications
• Check the impact of the design on existing features and services
• Check for clashes of the proposed drainage system against itself and existing
• Consider the impact on earthworks

Features include:

• Survey data in DXF, DWG, GENIO, ASCII formats
• Re-use of CAD layouts for horizontal design
• Dynamic horizontal and vertical alignment editing
• Automated vertical design based on user specified design parameters
• Varying width carriageways
• Free form carriageways
• User defined road construction
• Any shape of turning head supported
• Automated design change
• Full setting out
• Full site re-grades
• Complete project cut and fill calculations

This is the most widely used and tailored solution available. If you need an easy to use, flexible and highly productive tool to help meet ever tighter deadlines, PDS Site Developer is the only package to consider.