Summary

As a full company, with corresponding overhead costs, the average cost to hire a designer working for Witteveen + Bos is €90 per hour. In comparison, an experienced self employed designer working from home with a yearly income of €100.000 will do the same job for roughly €60 to €70 per hour (€100.000 / (36 x 40) = €69,44 per hour). Therefore an employee at Witteveen + Bos is required to be 30% more efficient at their job in order to remain competitive in the market. Some of this efficiency is naturally gained from working in a team, but a large part must be achieved through more efficient workflow.

This requires frequent reconsiderations and optimizations of the design process.

The goal of this research is making the design process of sewer systems more efficient by utilizing the developments in designing software, automizing design steps and optimizing the data transfer between different design software.

The main question is: How can the design process of a simple free-fall sewer system be accelerated, using software already in use at Witteveen + Bos?

Sub questions:
- What is the purpose of a sewer system?
- How has the design of sewer systems evolved?
- What are the common components of a sewer system?
- How can the components of a sewer system be defined?
- How are sewer systems currently designed at Witteveen + Bos?
- Which design steps are required in order to design a sewer system?
- Which new developments in software are available for the design process of sewer systems?
- How could these developments be used to further improve the efficiency of design steps?

This research report is limited by the licenses available to Witteveen + Bos employees. Therefore the software used in this report is limited to:
Civil 3D: 3D CAD drawing software
InfraCAD: The Dutch drawing standards plugin for C3D
Infoworks: Software used to simulate the performance of sewer systems
Dynamo for Civil 3D: A plugin for C3D that allows visual programming with Python scripts
Subassembly Composer: Software that allows for the creation of custom subassemblies, which can be used for the creation of Corridors in C3D.
Furthermore, the scope of this report was functionally limited to simple free fall sewer systems and structurally limited to chambers and pipes.