Towards AI-assisted Digitalisation of Structural Engineering Workflows

The current landscape of structural engineering is fragmented and in a state of flux between 2D plans used by builders and 2D or 3D plans used by architects.

Many structural engineering firms perform their calculations, required for example to determine the placement of beams for house extensions, by hand on a piece of paper.

This PhD vision project will explore the potential of transforming existing 2D building architecture plans into 3D models, which will then be used to automatically perform structural calculations based on legislative requirements.

The study will investigate the feasibility of this approach, including effective ways to represent and store the data, perform calculations, and capture changes in plans.

Computer vision will be used to contrast existing and proposed plans for amendments to structures, and perform calculations about structural integrity, potentially even suggesting positions for new beams.