Towards personalized structural engineering tools

Abstract

Structural engineering software has moved from in-house development to third-party vendors. This trend has been beneficial for the profession as a whole and permitted rapid migration to new environ-meats, particularly in exploiting IT capabilities in communication and information sharing. However, the trend has also significantly reduced individual organizations' abilities to express their design philosophies and style in their software. The paper reviews this trend and juxtaposes it to the author's efforts towards providing customizable tools. The paper concludes with some questions that need to be addressed before moving towards more personalized computational support.