engineering design day 2012 - College of Engineering @ The ...

AuTomATING CoNSTRuCTIoN DIGITAL RECoRD DRAWINGS
Interdisciplinary Engineering Design Program
CLASS
ENGR 498A/B
SpoNSoR
Sundt Construction Inc.
SpoNSoR mENToR/ADVISoR
Aidan M. Garza
pRoJECT mENToR
Clayton Grantham
TEAm mEmBERS
Alex Babis (CoE)
Mark McKissick (CoE)
Benjamin Zarin (EMG)
CoE = Computer Engineering
EMG = Engineering Management
TEAm 4919: pRoJECT SummARY
The goal of this project was to
design a software program that
automated a time-consuming, errorprone
and tedious process, that
is a necessity for each of Sundt’s
new projects. The current process
demands that Sundt employees
manually link and bookmark each
detail in the Digital Record Drawings
(DRD) using Adobe Acrobat Pro.
In any given construction task, the number of details to be referenced can range
from tens to hundreds depending on the magnitude of the project. By automating
this process, a huge reduction in the completion time of the tasks will be observed,
saving Sundt nearly $80,000 per year in labor costs; if the software is adopted at
each of their headquarters, their savings will increase dramatically. To mitigate any
incompatibilities between the automated and the current processes, the software
was designed to operate using Adobe Acrobat Pro. The software will output the DRDs
that the user is accustomed to, however, it will be accomplished much more readily
and efficiently. To accomplish this task, batch processes written in JavaScript were
generated to accomplish each step of the bookmarking and linking processes. After the
individual batch processes were written, they were assimilated into a larger program,
responsible for systematically employing the individual processes in Adobe Acrobat Pro.
35