Significant Guidance to Employ the Software to Analyze and Design the Reinforced Concrete Structures: State-of-The-Art

Abstract

Prevailing analysis and design of reinforced concrete (RC) structures is a critical stage in the construction industry to deliver the projects within the estimated construction time period and within the budget. The selection of suitable structural engineering software to perform the analysis and design tasks is not an easy matter of fact, especially with the existence of many specialized software in this domain such as Robot Structural Analysis, MIDAS Gen, SAP 2000, STAAD.PRO, Tekla Structural designer, S-Frame and many others. So a strong comparison between the existing software must be made before taking the final decision of selecting any software. The main goal of this paper is to present overall guidance for selection of the suitable software among the most common software used for the analysis and design of RC structures along with the supported design codes, analysis types and design modules incorporated in each software. The technical specifications, characteristics, application domains, incorporated structural design codes, limitation, technical popularity and capabilities of the existing most common used software were studied and compared. Based on the performed study, eleven software were selected and presented as a useful guideline for the structural engineers in the analysis and design of RC structures. In this paper, a complete guideline including the required technical information for structural engineers to choose the suitable software for analyzing and designing of the RC structures is presented.