| 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... |
These are much more standalone, and don't have many of the issues you listed.
No one I know is using the automated concrete design built into analysis programs like ETABS, Tekla, etc.