A site needed a design feasibility study, but nobody could get onto it. Here's how a UAV-captured digital twin let the customer decide to proceed or abort in weeks, not months.
A customer needed to investigate design feasibility for a site before committing to deployment. There was one problem: nobody could get onto it. Physical access was blocked, and resolving that the conventional way meant a long, expensive process with no guarantee at the end of it. The customer could spend months and a significant sum securing access, only to find the site was not feasible after all.
That is the kind of uncertainty that stalls a programme. Committing resource to a site you cannot yet assess is a gamble, and doing nothing while access negotiations drag on is not much better.
The objective was singular and unambiguous: complete a design feasibility study without physical access to the site.
A UAV survey stood in for boots on the ground, and became a digital twin every discipline could assess remotely.
DAS used UAV technology to survey the site remotely, capturing what would normally require boots on the ground. That survey output was processed into a digital twin, an accurate digital model of the site that stood in for the real thing.
The digital twin was shared with the technical, design and planning disciplines that needed to assess feasibility, and each could examine it from their own angle without ever setting foot on site. From the same digital twin, DAS built a Revit BIM model, which was then exported to AutoCAD to produce around 70 to 80% of the base General Arrangement drawing before any dependencies were confirmed on the ground. That let the customer make an informed decision, proceed or abort, without the delay and cost of the access process running in parallel.
Removing physical access from the critical path removed the single biggest source of delay. The customer went from an 18-month timescale to 6 weeks, and cut costs by more than half, because the question of feasibility no longer depended on the question of access.
The digital twin did more than answer yes or no. General arrangement drawings were completed from it, subject to dependencies that remained genuinely unknown until a site visit could confirm them, which is a known and manageable risk rather than an open-ended one. The customer had a real decision to make, backed by real information, months earlier than the conventional route would have allowed.
