"A good tool is half the job done": This proverb could be applied equally to the software industry. The more a program is task-tailored, the more efficiently the tasks can be solved. The variety and complexity of today's problems, especially in structural engineering, require specifically tailored solutions. Creating your own programs by means of textual programming requires in-depth knowledge and a great ability to abstract. Understandably, only very few engineering offices face this challenge. For this reason, there are additional software solutions providing the user with a visual development environment.
The Master's Thesis of Tamás Drávai, Haroon Khalyar, and Gábor Nagy deals with the effect of interoperability between Computer Aided Design (CAD) and Finite Element Modeling (FEM) software on structural modeling and analysis. Several case studies were conducted, where a building information model was transferred from CAD to FEM software with different data exchange formats.