Automation of Quantity Surveying in Construction Projects

The preparation of a complete and concise project document is a critical issue facing professionals, developers, and contractors working in the building industry. The lack of an accurate, fast, and effective method for estimating the bill of quantities creates problems during the design, tender, and construction supervision of construction projects for designers and contractors practicing in Saudi Arabia. The capability of a computer-aided drafting (CAD) based system to interface with local data, either from the designers and contractors or from manufacturers and commercial libraries, that allows for the estimation of the building bill of quantities in a more rigorous way is also lacking. The availability of an accurate and automated method to produce the bill of quantities from such libraries creates a benchmark in professional construction practice. This paper presents a computer program developed by the writer. This program is a third-party achievement that automates the aforementioned task and complements the standard AutoCAD system, which is not capable of extracting the project data pertinent to performing an automated bill of quantities. The program is written in C-language and has the capability to interface with other databases possessed by the designer or contractor. The AutoCAD has been taken as the base software because this is a cost-effective CAD software. Though Archicad Design plus available softwares can perform the automated quantity survey, it should be remembered that these packages are very expensive and used by fewer people compared with AutoCAD, which is used very widely.