RoadEng 12 brings smarter AI to NZ forest road design [Int]Friday 23 Oct 2026
Path Explorer AI, introduced in RoadEng 11, finds road locations that meet grade and design constraints. In Version 12, routes can tie into existing roads, so new construction goes only where it is needed. Engineers can send routes through waypoints such as landings, saddles or preferred crossings, and set tangent segments the route must follow, such as a bridge crossing or a required approach into a junction. Path Explorer AI can also now locate a complete road network across a block, not just one route at a time. “RoadEng has long been the standard for forest road design, and Version 12 is another big step forward,” said Jamie Black, RPF, Operational Planning & Road Design Team Lead at Forsite. “The 3D visualization and integrated hydrology tools help me produce better designs, but Path Explorer AI is what has changed how we plan road location. The new controls let the designer make the critical calls, and we can compare several feasible routes in minutes. We’ve now used it to plan more than 100 km of road for a range of clients.” In an independent study published this year in the Croatian Journal of Forest Engineering, researchers from the University of Banja Luka and Šume Republike Srpske compared Version 12 Path Explorer AI with a field-designed forest road in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The AI designs needed at least 45% less estimated earthwork. The researchers concluded that AI-driven corridor planning has clear potential as a practical design tool, especially when paired with high-resolution LiDAR terrain data. Digital Pre-Planting is a new tool that brings RoadEng’s terrain analysis to silviculture. Developed with Forest Growers Research’s Precision Silviculture Programme in New Zealand, it helps plan the establishment of plantation rows, balancing tree spacing and stocking requirements with the operating limits of in-block equipment on moderate and steep slopes. Foresters build a terrain model from LiDAR or other elevation data, import or draw block boundaries, divide the block into planting polygons by slope and aspect, set planting parameters and generate the layout. The result is a geolocated planting plan that can guide future operations and be shared with regulators. More >> Source & image credit: Softree Technical Systems | ||
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