Computing in Engineering Practice What Will the Future Hold?

Abstract

The rapidly advancing software technology is having an increasingly significant impact on the way engineering is practiced in a structural design office, and on the education that will be required of the next generation of engineers. The emerging structural engineering design software will relieve engineers of a number of tasks for which they have been trained in the past. Large segments of traditional structural engineering will be automated away. As a result, large numbers of design engineers involved in more or less routine activities will be replaced by fewer engineers with broadened educational requirements, which can be met only by professional schools. They will be supported by technicians, technologists, and other support staff with special knowledge and skills. The computer revolution will be driven by software developers, who will automate more and more of todays’s engineering design activities.