Who we are
planAI4BIM is a Regensburg based start-up and was founded in March 2020 by a team with background in science and business. Our passion is developing innovative digital solutions for the construction and real estate industry.
What is planAI4BIM?
planAI4BIM revolutionizes the digital transformation of the construction and real estate industry with an AI-based end-to-end process. Our software-as-a-service platform (SaaS) for the digitization of building and construction plans as well as technical drawings (structural, heating, plumbing, electrical, etc.) serves the goal of creating a structured, model-based digital twin of real estate assets. After applying our process, the digital twin is available for subsequent use through the software-independent exchange format IFC, which can be used collaboratively in the sense of an openBIM approach in a variety of digital tools.
Our goal
We realize the potentials of the digital transformation in the construction and real estate sector through our vision of an integrated and silo-free digital construction and real estate world in the form of digital twins generated from 2D plan data by artificial intelligence. Our solution provides an essential innovation for the digitization of valuable data with digital workflows along the life-cycle of your assets. Our solution transforms information currently "trapped" in the form of conventional construction planning documents to digital accessible information. Their intelligent use, analysis and evaluation is only one added value of the customers of our approach.
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With our AI-based solution, we extract discipline-specific information from building and construction plans as well as technical drawings of any kind. The end-to-end digital process, the database-oriented management of data as well as the interaction with customers takes place within our cloud-based platform (Microsoft Azure). The output file is generated in the internationally usable IFC format and can be downloaded directly from our platform or viewed in the cloud-integrated IFC viewer. This novel approach to digitizing planning data provides the digital back-bone for any BIM-based application along the entire value chain in the context of planning, design, construction, through to asset and facility management tasks of infrastructure assets. planAI4BIM enables you to create a valuable data source regarding your existing and future real assets.
The problem
Considering just Germany, there are more than 30 million existing buildings equipped with currently unused documentation in the typical engineering manner: as technical 2D drawings either only in paper format or at best in simple digital formats (i.e., pdf, dwg, png, jpeg, ...). In this context, often poor data quality, non-transparent data structures and missing data standards are major challenges for creating value with a digital workflow in the construction and real estate industry. Market players interestingly recognize that non-transparent and segmented data structures of their built assets are a major obstacle to any optimization, as well as making it difficult to assess and optimize sustainability in terms of a circular economy. The lack of accessible and integrated data across the entire lifecycle of building assets slows down the journey towards smart data use.
It takes about 1,000 hours to have an engineer manually digitize an average office building into an intelligent building information model.
Inadequate use of data and fragmented workflows cost the U.S. real estate industry US$ 15.8 billion annually. The European market is not much different.
The real estate and construction industry is responsible for more than 40% of global greenhouse gas emissions.
BIM-based models are available for only 2% of the existing building stock, thus impeding end-to-end BIM processes.
Efficiency and productivity are severely constrained by inaccessible data. The construction cost associated with design changes and planning errors correspond on average to about 30% of the total construction costs of a building.
The EU climate targets call for a reduction of CO2 emissions by at least 55% by 2030 and climate neutrality by 2050. To achieve these goals, accessible and transparent building information data is required.
Data is the new gold
Poor data quality, intransparent data structure and missing data standards are the main challenges that the digital transformation journey is currently facing. This is particularly true for the construction and real estate industry. By digitizing your 2D paper-based or PDF/PNG plans and transforming them into a powerful and standardized digital twin, you create a valuable 3D BIM data source for your existing assets or entire real estate portfolios. This paves the way to leverage your treasure trove of data currently lying dormant in the archive to gain valuable insights from data analytics, sustainability analysis and BIM-based applications. Furthermore, our solution generates a database on the materials used in existing buildings and thus makes a significant contribution to the basic idea of the circular economy in the construction and real estate sector.
What is the planAI4BIM workflow?
Our cloud-based end-to-end process
Upload
Upload your scanned or CAD-generated as-built plans in PDF or PNG format to our cloud-based platform and manage them from there.
planAI4BIM AI
Our innovative AI solution manages up to 80% of the manual workload that is needed to digitize your as-built plans into a Building Information Model for you.
Validation
In our editor you have the possibility to check and edit the digital twin output files before finalizing them. An intuitive user interface and a set of simple analytic tools are available for this purpose.
Download
The preliminary results of the AI process with its recognized components and their corresponding properties can be visualized in an IFC viewer. After finalization, you can directly download the output file in the IFC format but also in other formats such as CSV and then use it for BIM-based applications of any kind.
Upload
Review and editing
IFC Viewer
Our cloud-based end-to-end process can save up to 80% of the manual effort that is required to digitize an existing building in form of given paper-based plans into a model-based digital twin. As a result, we enable the cost-efficient creation of a digital twin at every lifecycle stage along the entire real estate value chain to remove the roadblocks that stand in the way towards the intelligent use of your existing data for a variety of BIM-based applications.
Typical use cases of our solution
