Industrial

TestFit 3.14: Industrial Roads and Single-loaded Parking

written by

Nat MacDonald

In this article

With the continued growth of consumer online shopping, industrial buildings like warehouses and distribution centers are becoming more and more in demand. When we launched the Industrial Configurator in the Fall of 2021, we wanted to help solve that problem—giving you the best optimized industrial building on every site.

Now we’re making some major updates to industrial sites, so you can get better generated sites from the start and get more customizations in the new manual mode.

New Manual Mode in Industrial Sites

The manual mode within our housing configurators is one of our customers’ favorites. And now we’ve extended it to the industrial sector, giving you more controls over each site.

We’re starting with improving the robustness of roads interacting with industrial sites. This includes:

Turning off ring roads
Moving automatically generated access roads
Adding new roads manually

Single-loaded Parking Aisle

To make sure our parking layouts are as versatile and precise as possible, we have added single-loaded parking aisles for industrial sites. This allows parking to be generated in contexts where there isn’t enough room for double-loaded parking aisle and allows the building footprint to be larger.

Note: The single-loaded parking update is also included in subdivision. If you don’t have enough room for a double-loaded drive aisle in a shallow parcel, a single-loaded drive aisle might be generated.

Other Industrial Sites Updates

There is more! We’ve also added a few improvements to make industrial sites as easy to use as possible. These updates include:

Ability to manually place the access points (entrances & exits) for industrial site and change their width & turning radius.

Manually place access points for industrial sites

New automatically generated labels and dimensions for industrial sites that can be toggled on or off.
Options for selecting which sides of an industrial building have parking.
Option to use the square footage of a warehouse to compute its number of trailer parking stalls instead of using its number of dock doors.

Improvements

Improved subdivision solves, allowing single-loaded rows of parcels.
Right click to change road type for all configurators.
Added support for specifying industrial parking limits in terms of parking rows.
Added a “flip” button to the industrial building panel to flip warehouses.
Connected industrial parking lots will now automatically merge.
Improved efficiency of industrial sites with narrow (fewer bays wide) warehouses.
Improved the parking layout inside complex concave shapes.
Added controls for min/max tray counts on each side of warehouse buildings.
Merged the industrial bay min/max controls into a single widget.

Reported Issues & Bug Fixes

Fixed a crash that could occur when solving multifamily sites.
Fixed a crash when setting the garage levels to 0 for a Podium Fill site.
Fixed a crash in the industrial solver due to lots being too small.
Fixed “Restore from Crash” resulting in another crash in some cases.
Fixed the metes & bounds tool rejecting small curves.
Fixed Cove.Tool requests hitting the timeout limit.
Fixed numerous inconsistencies in UI text.
Improved prototypical building placements on industrial sites.

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About Author

With 9 years of experience as a licensed mechanical engineer, Nat MacDonald brings his skills in engineering and technology to TestFit as a Product Manager. Nat talks with customers regularly to design product procedures and algorithms that help architects and developers build at scale. He has been a speaker at various tech and AEC conferences including BILT, ASHRAE, and Autodesk University. Outside of work, you can find him tweeting with the AEC tech community or mountain biking in Portland, Maine.