Structural drawing member schedule and screening

The problem

Reviewing structural drawings starts with bookkeeping: list every beam, column, slab and footing, read off its section, grade and span, and look for gaps. On a PDF set or a CAD file that takes hours, and it is where simple slips hide: a member with no grade, a footing with no site class.

A tool that pulls the members into one schedule and points at the gaps can speed up that first pass. It cannot do the review, and StructCheck does not check any member against a standard.

How it works

1. Open StructCheck and upload a drawing as DXF, PDF or IFC.
2. Optionally choose a soil class, applied to every member that doesn't carry its own. It is used only to tell whether a strip footing has a usable class recorded; nothing sizes or screens a footing with it. You can also choose an exposure class, but nothing uses it yet.
3. Select Read drawing. From a DXF, it reads text labels and blocks that give a member mark or a section, on any layer not named for another discipline; linework with no label is reported, never turned into a member. From an IFC, the structural elements. From a PDF, an AI vision model sorts the pages: schedule tables are read from the PDF's text, drawing sheets from an image of the page.
4. Review the member schedule. Each row shows its type, material, grade, section, span and how it was read. If a PDF has more pages than your plan reads, or a page could not be read at all, a warning says the schedule is incomplete.
5. Select Run Screening Checks. A completeness pass flags a row with no grade, a strip footing with no usable soil class, and a concrete beam with no reinforcement detail. StructByAI's own screening heuristics then look at two things: timber depth against span, and long steel spans. They are the product's own rules of thumb, with no recorded source in any standard: a screening note is information only, names no standard or clause, and is neither a pass nor a fail. Concrete members and footings get no size screening at all.
6. Every member is reported not checked, with the reason: no rule in this build is sourced from a standard. Nothing on the screen is a pass.
7. Export the schedule as CSV, XLSX or PDF, with the notes if you ran the screen.

The screening is fixed code. AI reads PDF pages only, so one PDF can return different members on different runs, even a whole page.

Worked example

Illustrative inputs, not a real project: suppose the parse returned these four members, and you chose soil class M.

• B1, a steel beam, 360UB57, grade 300, 6 m span
• C1, a column, 150x300, grade N32, material not identified
• F1, a concrete strip footing, 300x500, no grade
• F2, a concrete strip footing, 200x300, no grade

The screen returns no errors. It gives two missing-grade warnings, for F1 and F2, and no screening notes: B1's span is short, C1's material was not identified, and footings get no size screening. All four members are reported not checked. An automated test runs these members through StructCheck's own code and fails if this result changes.

Silence on a member is not a finding that it is adequate. Next you would read the schedule against the drawing, add the missing grades, and design-check every member yourself.

What it doesn't do

• It is not a design check or a code review. No member is checked against AS 3600, AS 4100, AS 1720, AS 2870 or the NCC, and nothing checks strength, stability, deflection, connections or loads. It speeds up your review but does not replace it, and the engineer who signs the design remains responsible.
• It can miss members entirely. Members are read automatically and can be misread or missed. A member never extracted never appears as a problem.
• A screening note is not a finding. The heuristics are product rules of thumb, not requirements of any standard. Silence on a member means no heuristic applied or fired, nothing more.
• It reads common notation only. It recognises Australian section designations from a catalogue no engineer has verified, and usual block and layer names. Only a section family the catalogue lists sizes for is compared with it; a size outside that list is marked unverified. A family it lists no sizes for, including welded beams and columns (WB, WC), angles, hollow sections and purlins, is never marked unverified: at most its dimensions or mass are bounds-checked.
• Its results are advisory. Verify every row against the drawing and every requirement against the published standard.