A structural engineering software development environment
Abstract
An evolution of the traditional disciplines of structural engineering and computational mechanics driven by the rapid advances in computer technology is currently underway. Research and instruction in these areas are becoming more software dependent and more software intensive. The success and pace of this evolution depends on the rapid and economic development of domain specific applications software. The SESDE (A Structural Engineering Software Development Environment) is an attempt to provide a systematic support for the development of structural engineering software systems. SESDE is centered around the concept of software reuse, based on object-oriented programming technologies, and composed of reusable software components and domain-specific CASE tools facilitating reuse. The present work focuses on the reusable components, and attempts to build the basic SESDE framework and to establish a model of such an environment which may be useful to other engineering areas. The reusable components are classified in four groups: (1) a graphical user interface development system (GUIDES); (2) an object-oriented database management system (ODBMS); (3) a generic object class library for engineering computing in general; (4) a structural engineering specific object class library. GUIDES is developed and has been used in research software development and instruction. GUIDES has features which have not been well addressed by existing commercial systems. A set of classes in the generic object class library is developed. These include classes for general data structures and utilities, for full matrices, and for sparse matrices. Techniques for engineering database management are reviewed. It is concluded that a commercial ODBMS should be integrated and adapted to support the features of the environment. Specific issues associated with the integration are given. Necessary follow-up work of the SESDE are outlined including both long-term development and short-term application of the SESDE components. The long-term tasks are to complete the SESDE system development, which includes the enhancement of the GUIDES, the integration of an ODBMS, the development and enhancement of the structural engineering specific and generic class libraries, and the development of CASE tools. The short-term tasks are focussed on the promotion of the use of existing reusable components.
Degree
Ph.D.
Advisors
White, Purdue University.
Subject Area
Civil engineering|Engineering|Computer science
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