CurveTrench takes a start, an end and a utility type — and returns ranked, constructable, costed underground routes as a sellable feasibility study. The desk-study phase of a buried-utility project, automated.
Routing a buried utility between two points today means weeks of GIS licences, record requests, consultant day-rates and marked-up PDFs — before anyone can say whether the scheme is even constructable, let alone what it costs. CurveTrench compresses that entire phase into a single desktop run: live data in, ranked constructable routes out, with the engineering reasoning — and the honest caveats — written down.
Map click, decimal coordinates, OS grid reference, what3words, UK postcode — or import the client's own drawing. PDF and KMZ are read directly, and an AI tracer lifts the route geometry straight off a scanned PDF plan. Draw no-go areas on the map or import your own constraint data — routes are pushed around them. Set the duct spec — count, diameter, spacing, cover — and the trench sizes itself.
For the corridor between A and B, CurveTrench pulls every road (with widths), railway, river, canal, land parcel and protected site — plus buried-utility evidence: pipelines, underground power cables, substations, manholes, street cabinets, telecom plant, marker posts. Government open data layers add heritage sites, listed buildings, flood zones, conservation areas and contaminated land — all on licensed Ordnance Survey basemaps.
A cost-based router explores thousands of paths through the road and land network under several engineer profiles — cheapest-dig, fewest-consents, lowest-traffic-impact and more — scoring every metre for road class, land cover, private land and crossing risk. It returns genuinely different options, ranked by a total difficulty index.
Wherever a route crosses a railway, river or motorway, CurveTrench selects the construction method — open-cut, HDD, auger bore or micro-tunnel — and derives a bore design basis: depth, drilled length, diameter, entry/exit angles, with every assumption stated. It checks launch and reception space and attaches the asset owner's rules and approval lead time.
RED survey markers land wherever mapped utility evidence clusters — the places you'd most likely hit something — each one demanding trial holes and a PAS 128 survey before pricing. CurveTrench tells you what it doesn't know, on the record.
Every route is checked against the national street-works record built from DfT Street Manager open data — live and planned works, recently completed works still inside their reinstatement moratorium, and Section 58 restrictions where the authority has closed the road to new openings. The router steers away from restricted corridors, counts down the months remaining, and flags live works as joint-dig opportunities.
Cable-pull engineering along the real route geometry: cumulative pull tensions, sidewall pressures at every bend, minimum bend-radius checks — and jointing bays placed automatically where tension, drum length or a safety margin says the pull must break. Trench cross-sections are drawn to the reinstatement build-up each road type demands, with excavation, backfill and muck-away volumes per surface.
The traffic-management module turns each route into numbered phases: which measure on which street — signals, lane narrowing, closure — with durations from productivity rates, working hours, signing references, the permits needed, and a total programme in days.
A client-ready PDF feasibility report, an editable Excel cost matrix with live per-route costings and quantities, a CAD-ready DXF plan with basemap and per-route data sheets, and GeoJSON / KML / CSV for GIS, Google Earth and schedules.
Executive summary, ranked routes with maps, crossing details with vector bore sketches, trench sections per road type, street-works notes, TM phasing schedule, survey scope — and honest caveats, in writing.
An editable rates sheet drives live per-route costings — excavation, reinstatement, TM, crossings and survey quantities. Change a rate, every route reprices. Contingency built in, formulas exposed.
Layered CAD plan with georeferenced basemap, route linework at true trench width, plus a full data sheet per route — TM phases, crossings, survey points.
Straight into GIS, Google Earth or your scheduling tools. Every route, crossing and survey point, machine-readable.
HV cable route optioneering with consent lead-times and SED crossing methods resolved before the first site visit.
Bid-stage feasibility with a defensible cost matrix — priced routes in hours, not weeks.
Sellable desk studies, branded and caveated, generated while the kettle boils. Margin on every one.
Long linear routes through dense urban networks, with traffic impact and trenchless crossings handled.
CurveTrench is patent-pending technology of the Curve IP group and is not publicly distributed. Tell us who you are and what you're routing — approved organisations receive a licensed build and onboarding directly from our team.
A per-seat licence covers the software, updates and engineer support. Each feasibility run then draws from your study credits — so you pay for the studies you actually run, and a single run still costs a fraction of the desk study it replaces. Talk to us and we'll put numbers on it for your team.