As a structural engineer, I see a good opportunity to make reinforced concrete design software available in a SaaS format. The competition is outdated, clunky, requires local installation and messing about with licenses. Design firms are paying $1000-$3000/year per user/seat for what amounts to a pretty basic app.
Unfortunately, there are very few people that understand both computer science and structural engineering.
I suspect much engineering software is ripe for innovation. My wife is a Water Resources Engineer- a specialized form of Civil that focuses on "when it rains, where the hell is all this water going to go?".
The software for that kind of modeling is apparently pretty basic, pretty expensive, buggy, etc.
A friend of mine was an environmental consultant, and went to startup weekend. They successfully made a SaaS app that would spit out an environmental report in minutes instead of days of manual entry. Just a really good example of small applications that have a huge benefit in old industries http://www.enterratech.com/reports/1/
99% Invisible's America's Last Top Model. The Mississippi River Basin model was shut down because the computer models were cheaper and "good enough." They still use physical models today for other projects, albeit on a much smaller scale.
Fluid simulation is a very difficult problem to simulate, structures are a lot simpler.
I think that the models are quite advanced and where the money goes.
It does not mean that you just can't take a couple of web developers and make it usable, but as the market is small it might pass the price point with a supersonic bang...
My brother in law would agree with this, he is building an open source project for collecting all of the analysis that civil and structural engineers have to do on every project into a single repository where people can share and augment the calculations. (think if it as github for civil and structural engineers)
I would love to see that as well. I have a project with similar goals (posted above). I would like for users to be able to simply call built in functions to do the normal tedious stuff like stress in rods, beams, etc.
I have a friend who works in construction glass. (It's NYC, that's a big market). They ship millions of dollars of complex, custom molded glass every year. Everything's kept track of by emailing excel spreadsheets.
That's disgusting. I feel filthy. I replaced a system in my first client school that also used excel attachments for tracking student data, exams results, attendance, assignments, etc. I could physically feel better once I saw my own implementation replacing email attachment system. Since then email-excel has been a sensitive topic for me.
I've recently found a department for the company I'm working for needs help as they have literally reached the limits of Excel.
They have a sheet with around 30 rows and 150 columns, and they have 100 of these sheets (in a single Excel file). Some parts use formulas, but usually when somebody needs to change something they need to go through every single sheet. The issue is now when they try to add new data Excel won't let them.
I don't even want to know how they share the file or do backups.
I work in the healthcare industry. Basically we ARE the industry nowadays, and we use excel and word to keep everything "organized". There are some half-ass designed software,websites, and databases that are used as well, but it's amazing how a multi-billion dollar company can rely on this level of technology. I think they get these bids to run state government programs, and have absolutely no plan in place. And for some reason instead of just automating or updating things, the company just throws bodies at the problems and makes everything "production" based. I'm sure a lot of places are similar, but this is a white collar factory on such a massive scale, it literally sickens me. There are so many channels that approval for changes has to go through, that by the time some small minor change is implemented its already way too late, too distorted by having so many hands touch the problem, and too outdated.
Same with the electronics manufacturing industry, where inventories and BOMs are done in Excel. It is a pain in the ass, time consuming and error-prone. But that's what managers want.
A fellow structural engineer here. I think that there's little room for innovation in the "calc" area. The cost of doing calcs is a small fraction of the overall budget of a structural project. Modeling/drawings is where it's at. The analysis/design toolset of a structural engineer (the FEA/design programs) hasn't changed in essence since the 80's outside of drafting/modeling, and for good reason: the marginal cost of an engineer perfecting their analysis exceeds marginal revenue. There's a sweet spot where an experienced structural engineer knows to stop refining their calcs, with the rest of the effort is spent on detailing, which sets apart good structural design from mediocre.
Where I would invest (if I were Autodesk or their competitor) is in releasing CAD tools for free in exchange for a consent to use the designs/details internally for ML purposes. Would love to contribute if anyone is working on such a product.
I might be working on something that you would be interested in. MVP is at www.cadwolf.com. I am a structural engineer with an MS from UT Austin. Website in written with php using Laravel and angular framework for JS.
The plan is to link CAD to the mathematics and then link the finite element to this as well. The system would also function as a sort of github for engineering where users can find and use functions to do most standard analysis. Email is in my profile if anyone is interested in talking.
I checked out cadwolf and as an engineer myself I find it very interesting. I am curious to understand a few points:
- Why do you center everything around documents? Is it more because people are used to it, or do you believe that they are best fit for design-tasks?
- I saw that to update multiple documents after a requirement changes, you need to open them one by one, in the order of their dependencies. Have you tested that this is still a viable approach, once you have thousands of dependencies and multiple users in a complex design?
I really like the equations and how you only allow to make formally correct equations (including units). Anxious to see how this develops.
(full disclosure: I am co-founder of a Software which tries to achieve the same aims using different concepts: www.valispace.com)
What I call "Document" are not files in the sense of a word file. They look like text files because that is what I thought engineers would be comfortable dealing with. However, they function as programs. Documents can be used as programs within other documents as well. Documents fill both the need to solve the calculations and to document them in one place. It eliminates the need to update documentation, have multiple platforms, etc.
There are places for users to upload and store data as well - datasets.
As of now, the code solves equations in javascript within the browser. This is why documents have to be opened when a requirement changes - because I have no server side of the code to solve them without the browser. It isn't a long term solution, merely a step in the building on the platform. My next step is to add a server side code that is capable of solver more complex and larger equations on the server. When that is done, changes to requirements will update documents without the need to open them manually. I plan on using python and there are several large libraries available.
This will allow me to link documents to CAD. When the math changes, the CAD will change as well. Once that is done, I will add a finite element meshing and solution system to create an engineering platform that essentially does everything.
I like your site. It's nice to see other people addressing these problems. I am also an aerospace guy. I worked on the shuttle for a while and then designed some components for the Orion. Shoot me an email if you want to talk more.
Tekla Structures has dedicated reinforcement concrete design features. The licence cost is probably closer to 10k per seat.
You need computational geometry, computer graphics, and structural engineering expert level domain knowledge to implement anything. You need to create traditional 2D machine/construction design drawings from the 3D models. Then you need to sell it to corporations, whose work, most of all, must be dependable and free of guess work.
You need to know what sort of geometries you can use to model the reinforcements. Then you need to know how to design the system so it can handle very large amounts of geometry.
The worst of all is you need to deal with god awful industry standard formats- DWG, DGN, IFC, Step/Iges and so on. Maybe DWG import and export first.
To have any real chance you need a guy or two who are good with numerical code, someone who is familiar with e.g. Game engines, soemone who knows computer graphics, a structural engineer to tell how he does his job and what the thousand inconsistencies in the field are (this is not a trivial domain like housing or transport), a sales/marketing guy to connect and push the product.
And, like someone else estimated, the potential market is not gigantic - which is kinda funny because we all depend on reinforced concrete but don't need so many engineers for the design work...
> I was more leaning towards member design software, such as spColumn and S-Concrete.
The utility of your software tools will be very limited if you are restricting yourself to only member design instead of total structure solutions like ETABS. Why should engineer pay you at all if they can use spreadsheet for free to do what you do with your SaaS?
> No one I know is using the automated concrete design built into analysis programs like ETABS, Tekla, etc.
Not too sure about this because I know quite a lot of people who are using these tools. Any reason why the people you know don't use ETABS or Tekla?
> Why should engineer pay you at all if they can use spreadsheet for free to do what you do with your SaaS?
Why do businesses invest in new tech? Why pay for excel when I can use a pen and calculator? The answer is because it makes them more efficient. We have excel sheets to do the same thing, matlab code to do the same thing, and yet here we are paying for these member design tools because they are the most efficient for us. If you save an engineer even a couple of minutes for each element they are designing, you essentially pay for the software.
>Any reason why the people you know don't use ETABS or Tekla?
We do use ETABS extensively for analysis. We don't use it for design. It is foolhardy to trust the automated RC design in these software. That seemed to be the standard of practice around here, but perhaps it is different in other areas of the world.
> It is foolhardy to trust the automated RC design in these software
Do you mind if I ask why? I'm working on a sort of general approach toward designing trustworthy engineering software, and I'm trying to collect as many reasons as possible for "can't trust the software".
Since you can already do the analysis (like ETABS), and you are planning to do individual member design, why put the two and two together and do an automated RC analysis+design software? There is no reason to distrust an automated software anymore than separate analysis+design software.
There absolutely is a reason: seismic design. We end up doing a lot of data manipulation between the FEA stage and member design stage.
Its not a distrust so much as a fundamental flaw. For simple gravity design it works fine, but even then we are using spColumn because its just quicker for us.
Care to explain why you have to manually do lots of data manipulation between FEA and member design? Why not write a software that can automate these whatever data manipulation? Seems to me that an All-In-One software should have no problem doing analysis, the-whatever-data-manipulation, and the member design.
In the US there are about 281,400 civil engineers [1]. I couldn't find more detailed information on structural engineers.
-Assume about 10% are practicing structural engineers who need to design concrete structures = 28140.
-Assume a company wants 1 license for every 2 engineers = 14070. (I base this off the fact that my company has 6 licenses for 12 engineers, but we may be higher than average)
-Assume we could get 10% market share = 1407 subscribers.
-Assume $1000/subscriber/year = $1,407,000 from the US market
I think this is an overoptimistic view of the size of the market. The field is highly fragmented. A large fraction of structural engineers are contractors or work for smaller firms (think wood design, rather than concrete/steel) and wouldn't be target customers for section analysis and concrete detailing software. An absolute majority of those that work for the larger firms don't require anything more than Excel spreadsheets. From my experience, a typical structural engineer is a rather savvy computer user, often times writing Excel macros or AutoLISP scripts to automate their tasks.
A large not-going-name-it software package for modeling steel and concrete structures creates alone over 100M a year. It hardly dominates the market so depending on how the market is segmented a good estimate is probably any number between 1 and 10 times this.
Single seat licences are not the only revenue model. Once a product gains traction consulting, training and providing VIP helpdesk and bugfixing services factor in as well.
I am a fellow engineer (Satellites in my case) and we have been fed up with engineering-tools in general (specially systems engineering), which seems to only consist of Excel-Spreadsheets and document-management systems. Even in the space industry there has been practically no innovation since the 60's more than digitalization of documents.
We are working since 1.5 years with some engineers on a software to solve this: www.valispace.com
I would be curious to hear from you whether what we are building with a focus on the space-industry also applies to structural engineering.
Out of curiosity, what do you think of what flux.io is doing? If a SaaS structural engineering application could be integrated with that, would it address your needs?
(For what it's worth, I'm doing something similar in the transport planning space. And yes, bridging the gap between that and modern CS is a substantial piece of work.)
I am working on doing this. The project is called cadwolf. The MVP is up now and I will coming out with a full version in January. If anyone has comments, love to hear them. If you are interested in collaborating, let know too.
Unfortunately, there are very few people that understand both computer science and structural engineering.