Automating Bridge Design

To avoid some of the pitfalls of manual design calculations, Parsons Brinckerhoff Quade & Douglas engineers designing a series of bridges for a $280 million section of the New Jersey Turnpike automated the entire design process. They tapped all the appropriate in-house resources when putting together the hardware and software for the project. For superstructure plane grid analysis, steel beam design, field splice design, column design and abutment design, they used all the available mainframe computer programs. To fill in any technological gaps they developed new software in-house.