Developing a Finite Element Analysis Agent

Recently there is a trend towards using it in the early stages of design. A designer may use FEA just to validate the structural integrity of a design or she may use it for structural optimization along with the parametrized design techniques. This paper examines the requirements of a structural analysis agent and proposes an architecture to facilitate FEA in a concurrent design environment. The next section briefly describes how FEA is used in a typical industrial set up. Section 3 presents a survey of existing FE tools. Section 4 discusses some issues related to the development of an FEA agent. Section 5 proposes an architecture for the FEA agent that addresses the issues described in Section 4 and finally Section 6 presents the concluding remarks.