IDENTIFYING PHYSICAL BUILDING COMPONENTS FROM GRAPHICAL REPRESENTATION

THE OBJECTIVE OF THIS PHASE I PROPOSAL IS TO DEVELOP A DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION CONCEPT OF AN EXPERT INTEGRATED SYSTEM THAT CAN SCAN A CONSTRUCTION DRAWING AND AUTOMATICALLY GENERATE AN ACCURATE BILL OF MATERIALS FROM THE ELEMENTS IN THE DRAWING. A PROTOTYPE WILL BE DEVELOPED ON A MICROCOMPUTER USING AUTOCAD, DBASE III, AND OTHER TOOLS AND CUSTOM PROGRAMS AS NECESSARY. THE WORK PLAN CAN BE BROKEN INTO FIVE CATEGORIES: PRODUCT EVALUATION AND SELECTION (SELECT APPROPRIATE TOOLS TO BE USED FOR FURTHER SYSTEM IMPLEMENTATION), GRAPHIC REPRESENTATION OF COMPONENTS (USING GRAPHIC REPRESENTATION STRUCTURES AND INFERENCE PROCESSES TO DETERMINE WHAT KIND OF BUILDING COMPONENT A GIVEN DRAWING ELEMENT IS), DRAWING ANALYSIS (ESTABLISHING THE APPROPRIATE DIMENSIONS OF THE GIVEN DRAWING ELEMENT FOR TAKEOFF PURPOSES), SUMMARY FILE GENERATION (DEVELOPMENT OF TOOLS TO REDUCE THE DATA GENERATED BY THE DRAWING ANALYSIS AND GRAPHIC REPRESENTATION TO A SPECIFIC FILE OR SET OF FILES), AND LINK TO DATABASES (LINKING THE SUMMARY FILE TO A DATABASE PROGRAM FOR REPORT GENERATION, ETC.).