The design and development of an integrated system for object-oriented finite element computing

Finite element method (FEM) is widely used in science and engineering since 1960´s. The vast majority of FEM software is procedure-oriented. However, this conventional style of designing FEM software encounters problems in maintenance, reuse, and expansion of the software. Recently, the object-oriented finite element method attracts the attention of many researchers, and now there is a growing interest in this method. In this paper, the object-oriented finite element (OOFE) is briefly introduced. The design and development of an integrated OOFE system is then described. A comparison of the integrated OOFE system and a procedure-oriented system shows that our OOFE system has many advantages.