Structural engineering workflow automation offers numerous benefits, including:
Increased Efficiency: Automation eliminates manual and repetitive tasks, allowing engineers to focus on more complex and critical aspects of their work. This leads to increased productivity and faster project completion times.
Error Reduction: By automating routine tasks such as calculations and design iterations, the likelihood of human errors is significantly reduced. Automated workflows can perform calculations with greater accuracy, reducing the risk of design flaws and improving overall project quality.
Consistency: Automation ensures a consistent and standardized approach to structural engineering. Design guidelines, codes, and best practices can be integrated into automated workflows, ensuring compliance and reducing variability in design outputs.
Cost and Time Savings: Automated workflows enable engineers to complete projects more efficiently, reducing the time and effort required for design iterations. This translates into cost savings for both engineering firms and clients.
Design errors can lead to a mean additional direct cost of more than 7%. Having an automated structural engineering workflow with error-checking will give you a competitive edge while saving time and costs.
Enhanced Collaboration: Automation can facilitate collaboration between structural engineers and other project stakeholders, such as architects, contractors, and project managers. Automated workflows can streamline information exchange, improve coordination, and provide real-time updates, leading to better project outcomes.
Scalability: Automation allows structural engineering firms to handle larger workloads and scale their operations without significant increases in staffing. With automated processes in place, firms can efficiently handle multiple projects simultaneously.
Design Exploration and Optimisation: Automated workflows can be integrated with optimisation algorithms to explore a wide range of design options quickly. This enables engineers to evaluate multiple scenarios, iterate designs, and find optimal solutions that meet performance, safety, and cost requirements.
Risk Mitigation: Automated workflows can incorporate structural analysis and simulation tools to assess the performance of designs under various conditions, such as seismic events or extreme weather. This helps identify potential risks early in the design phase and allows for adjustments to improve structural integrity and safety.
Documentation and Reporting: Automation can streamline the generation of design documentation and reports. By automatically populating standardised templates with relevant data, engineers can save time and ensure consistent documentation throughout the project.
Continuous Improvement: Automated workflows can collect data and performance metrics, providing valuable insights for process improvement. By analysing the data generated by automation, engineers can identify bottlenecks, optimise workflows, and enhance their design practices over time.
Overall, structural engineering workflow automation offers significant benefits in terms of efficiency, accuracy, collaboration, cost savings, and design optimization. By leveraging automation, structural engineers can streamline their workflows, improve project outcomes, and deliver high-quality designs more effectively.