This is an investigation assignment. You will work on this in your own time and complete the work ready for submission by the advertised deadline.

Construction Quotation Assistant

You have been approached by a local small business that specializes in the construction of concrete retaining walls to create an application to enhance part of the core functionality of the business. The application you are to create should automate the quotation process for pricing
the construction of retaining walls.

Each square metre of retaining wall costs a base amount of $514.72. This cost covers the price for site preparation, supply of material and construction of wall. Issues impacting the construction and therefore price of retaining walls include the following: difficulty of the land where the wall is to be built (normal, sandy, limestone, bluestone), the ease of access to the site, and the address of the walling project.

The user of the application will be able to specify the length of the wall and the height of the start and end of the wall. Concrete sleepers are 2m in length and 200mm in height. For this application it can be assumed that all walls are to be built from this basic size.

For this task you are asked to create a program that demonstrates the core algorithms that will prototype the general operation of the application. It should be a text based application that will accept user input and display the price and number of sleepers required for a retaining wall.

The output should not only provide the two values mentioned previous but should also provide an itemized representation of each bay of sleepers. Finally you should capture all inputs for a session and write these values out to a CSV file that could potentially be opened in a spreadsheet application.

The following is a typical interaction session (user input is in bold):

Welcome to the Quotation Assistant

Use this application to generate the required number of sleepers for your job and the initial quotation.

By using trigonometry calculations you can calculate the height of individual bays. The required is as follows:

a. Calculate the angle of the entire wall from the lowest height to the start of the highest bay height, ie:

b. Using this angle and the known length of each bay, the number of sleepers for each bay can be calculated. If the calculated height of a bay exceeds half the height of a sleeper than a full sleeper is required. For example a height of 249mm for a bay will require one sleeper; a height of 499mm will require 2 sleepers; a height of 750mm will require 4 sleepers.

c. The total number of sleepers can then be used to calculate the total metres squared required to construct the wall, which can then be used to calculate the total cost.

You will need to ensure that the user supplies the correct input values. If incorrect values are supplied then you should ask for them to be re-entered.