ARGE Baustahl

Shaping structural steel may be done by machine, but the initial set-up involves manual data entry. In this phase, reinforcement plans are translated into the file format steel-shaping machines require to generate the final product. Created by structural engineers, reinforcement plans include steel lists that collate the shapes, quantities, lengths, and weights of all the structural steel needed in a project. Reinforcement plans and steel lists are not, however, standardized. ARGE Baustahl receives them in various formats and file types, and making them usable requires manually entering every piece of data. This is time consuming and highly detail oriented, with even small errors leading to expensive problems in production.

Using advanced techniques like OCR (optical character recognition), Azure AI Document Intelligence, image segmentation, and digital table recognition, sclable developed a working prototype of custom software called ‘SteelFileGenerAItor’. Launched in two phases, the first version extracted data from steel lists manually selected in reinforcement plans. The second version expanded functionality to include automatic steel list recognition. With controls like automated backchecking also in place, ARGE Baustahl now oversees the generation of steel-list files - rather than doing it all themselves.