4th International Conference on Earthquake Engineering

Computer software for academic research (e.g. DRAIN2D) is often deficient in Graphical User Interface (GUI) and commercial software doesn’t open GUI’s framework to the user. The advantage of GUI is so evident and the requirements of GUI always exist. Thus, there exist sufficient reasons to research on the GUI’s framework. This article introduces that how to build an extensible and flexible GUI system for the structural analysis program. Changes of requirement are considered in this exploratory study and the authors proposed Pattern-Oriented Design by which GUI’s framework becomes true object oriented. Authors adopt the nonlinear structural analysis program PISA3D as the analysis engine and implement a GUI named GISA3D (Graphical Interface of Inelastic Structural Analysis for 3D Systems) for PISA3D using the proposed methodology. In addition to collaborations and consequences of design pattern, authors show the essential difference between VISA3D and GISA3D in this paper.