Startup Idea: Automated Construction Pricing Software for Civil Engineering Projects
I work in the civil engineering industry as a project engineer, and I see a lot of areas where technology would make the process a lot more efficient. One example to this would be the pricing area. Currently to make a construction project happen, the construction company would get the plans of the building from the architecture firm or their in-house architect with all the details on them, such as the type of the material, the dimensions of the wall/window/doors etc., and would have to manually enter these along with costs to another software system to compute the total cost. The project engineer would also have to predict how many man-hours it would take to build each one of these components. Doing all of these pricing calculations is necessary for being able to provide a quote. It is a very inefficient and human error prone task, where any error could cost the firm thousands of dollars. Any errors in the predictions is often worth a lot of money. I do think there would be a lot of demand for a system that could take as input the blueprint and utilize visual processing methods to convert it to a total cost of constructing each one of the components. I have never tried to come up with a solution like this. How I would approach the problem would be to do the most tricky parts, which would be: 1. converting a 2D black-and-white set of plans for a building into sum of all the components and the dimensions. 2. Coming up with a predictive model that estimates the man-hours it would take to build each component.
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