Automated pipeline routing - not months of redrawing by hand.

RouteStudy was started by pipeline and utility engineers who spent years routing corridors the slow way - hand-drawing alternatives over parcel maps, checking each one against roads, waterways, existing utilities, and easements one layer at a time, then doing it all again the moment new information became available.

That process is repeatable, which means it's exactly the kind of problem worth automating - carefully, without stripping out the engineering judgment that made those routes defensible in the first place. RouteStudy is that process, built into software we wished we'd had.

RouteStudy is built and operated by NOVARUN, LLC, the engineering software company founded by those same engineers. NOVARUN is the company; RouteStudy is its product.

The world deserves timely, cost and space efficient utilities. RouteStudy aims to provide that through leveraging the technologies at our disposal in this day and age. The arteries and veins that keep every country alive deserve the best, which is what we strive to provide.

Every candidate corridor is scored against a weighted cost surface built from real constraint data, not a single “shortest path” calculation. The factors that go into that surface:

• Parcel impact - penalized by how far a route cuts into a tract, not just whether it crosses one. Hugging the edge of a parcel is a narrow easement strip; cutting through the middle bisects the whole property.
• Existing ROW and easements - rewarded when a route can reuse an already-disturbed corridor instead of creating a new one.
• Utility conflicts - penalized near existing buried infrastructure, where a crossing means real coordination and real risk.
• Waterways, wetlands, and terrain - penalized for crossings and steep slope, since both drive up construction cost and environmental review.
• Roads, rail, and railroad-owned land - penalized more heavily than an ordinary parcel crossing, reflecting the real permitting burden of crossing a carrier's right-of-way.
• Property Boundaries - routes are rewarded for running parallel to a parcel's boundary line rather than bisecting it, even when a shorter path is available. It costs a little more, on paper, to stay near the edge of someone's land instead of cutting through the center of it.

Because there's rarely one right answer, RouteStudy generates four alternatives per project, each weighted differently - a balanced route, one that minimizes new acquisition, one that minimizes length, and one that minimizes conflicts - so an engineer is comparing real tradeoffs, not accepting a single black-box answer.

Every crossing is also checked against codified trenchless schema - the corridor tells you not just where you cross something, but whether that crossing is recommended to be trenchless instead of an open cut, and why.

RouteStudy is built on the same categories of data an engineer would pull manually today, sourced from the same public and county-level agencies:

• Roadway centerlines and right-of-way from TxDOT
• Parcel boundaries from the statewide parcel fabric (TxGIO / StratMap), carrying appraisal-district ownership and valuation
• Wetlands from the USFWS National Wetlands Inventory
• Rivers, streams, and waterbodies from USGS hydrography
• Floodplain data from FEMA, where available for a corridor
• Building footprints from state strategic mapping programs

That base data covers what's publicly available. Utility and easement data - inherently project-specific and often security-sensitive - always comes from the project itself, not a central database, and is layered in alongside the public data for every run.

We take that sensitivity seriously. Whatever you upload to a project - easement documents, utility as-builts, geotechnical data - is stored securely and used only to run that project. We do not sell it, share it, or hand it to anyone else. It stays yours.