How Optioneer for Development accelerated Vitens’ pipeline route planning from 9 months to just 3 months
To safeguard long-term supply and keep up with demand, Vitens is expanding its trunk-main system to ensure province-to-province redundancy within 24 hours.
80%
initial approximation within hours.
95%
approximation after configuration.
>60%
project time saved compared to current process.
Vitens needed a repeatable, data‑driven process to drastically cut design development time without compromising engineering rigour or permitting compliance.
Vitens is the Netherlands’ largest drinking water utility, serving 5.8 million people across 93 municipalities through ~48,000 km of distribution network.
Traditional desktop studies for pipeline route selection demand months of GIS analysis, contractor input, and iterative stakeholder reviews.
Typical figures for a 30 km scheme are 9‑12 months, 4 external contractors, and >70 days of project‑manager time. With dozens of schemes in the pipeline, Vitens needed a fast and reliable solution.
The process
Vitens benchmarked Optioneer on two real projects. Approximately 10–15 hours of Vitens engineering time were spent adjusting Optioneer to the local conditions, datasets and constraints.
Using Project 1 as a baseline, ensuring the outputs reflected Vitens’ decision-making across engineering, environmental, cost, and social criteria. This setup was then reused for Project 2 with no additional adjustment required.
Vitens benchmarked Optioneer on two real projects. Approximately 10–15 hours of Vitens engineering time were spent adjusting Optioneer to the local conditions, datasets and constraints.
Using Project 1 as a baseline, ensuring the outputs reflected Vitens’ decision-making across engineering, environmental, cost, and social criteria. This setup was then reused for Project 2 with no additional adjustment required.
The results
Project 1: Using default settings and data, and within <8 hours of computation and light iteration, Optioneer produced alignments matching 80% of Vitens final routes engineered over the preceding year. After configuration and iteration, alignment rose to 95% within 3 months.
Project 2: Using the same calibrated model, viable routes for an entirely different project were generated from scratch in just hours, giving Vitens side-by-side cost vs environmental trade-offs for internal strategic discussions.
Project 1: Using default settings and data, and within <8 hours of computation and light iteration, Optioneer produced alignments matching 80% of Vitens final routes engineered over the preceding year. After configuration and iteration, alignment rose to 95% within 3 months.
Project 2: Using the same calibrated model, viable routes for an entirely different project were generated from scratch in just hours, giving Vitens side-by-side cost vs environmental trade-offs for internal strategic discussions.
Viable routes generated in hours.
Optioneer accelerated iteration by >90%.
Final routes aligned ~95% with Vitens original route.
I’m very pleased with the result. It would be a lot less time-consuming to start future routes this way. By using Optioneer to get the base route and then applying our expert judgment to fine-tune it, we only need to spend some time finalising routes, rather than building them from scratch.
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