Adapting Collaborative Software Development Techniques to Structural Engineering

Software engineering has been fundamentally transformed by a collaborative development model. Facilitated by powerful tools, even a modest software project can benefit from a global virtual community of developers. The authors of this article propose that the collaborative techniques used in modern software development can also be applied to other fields, such as structural engineering. This requires the creation of editors, compilers, evaluators, and other tools that are analogous but not identical to those used in software. To demonstrate this, the authors created a prototype virtual wind tunnel (VWT) that implements the ideas of collaborative design in the context of structural engineering. The VWT allows users to edit structural designs, compile designs into usable models for simulation, perform wind simulations, evaluate the results, and then share and discuss their work with other users. The VWT has been used as a platform for projects ranging from small classroom activities to large-scale crowdsourcing studies.