Integrated Framework for Automating the Structural Design Iteration

Structural designers especially in India use STAAD (Structural Analysis And Design) software to execute the structural analysis and design. This analysis and design follow typical steps in sequence starting from model preparation by defining nodes and elements, material properties, support conditions, loads along their combinations, analyses, design options, etc. During this design process in STAAD, iterations generally occur either due to changes in structural loads and their combinations; or to obtain the optimal design section. In this entire design process, when any of the information exchange occurs along the cycles/loops it is termed as iteration. Automating these structural iterations can speed up the design evolution on STAAD. Till date, negligible steps have been taken towards automating these structural design iterations. DSM (Design Structure Matrix) is identified as a promising tool for representing and modelling iterative loops. It is a matrix-based tool with the same list of entities along the rows and columns encapsulated with relationships along the off-diagonal cells. Re-sequencing the DSM rows/columns can identify the iterations as blocks. OpenSTAAD is the API (Application Programming Interface) functionality in STAAD which is proposed to automate the iterative structural design in STAAD. The objective of the paper is to model and automate the structural design iterations using DSM and OpenSTAAD respectively. This proposed framework was applied to a case illustration of six-storey building. Preliminary results of the model are presented herewith.