Civil Engineering Association

Verifying the correctness of structural engineering calculations

Approximately 50% of calculations submitted to building control departments for approval are now produced by computer. Engineers say that due to the pressure of work in the design office, checking is not as thorough as they would like. From the starting position that the data has been checked, this research develops an extensive set of models which are self checking and have each been verified with sets of automatically generated data providing extensive coverage for each model. All systems are described in sufficient detail such that they may be used by others.

The systems developed for verifying the correctness of structural engineering calculations, based on:
• the inclusion of an automatic self-check in every structural model
• the development of a parameter specification table permitting
• the automatic generation of engineered sets of test data for each model
• the automatic running of the sets of test data for a thousand runs for each model
• the automatic reporting of the results giving a statistical summary are all new to the field of structural engineering.

Verifying the correctness of structural engineering calculations considers calculations for both the structural analysis of frameworks and the structural design of components such as beams, slabs & columns, and develops a unified approach for the development of Verified Models for both types of calculation. In this thesis, verifying means establishing the truth or correctness of software models by examination or demonstration.

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