Computer analysis: avoiding the ‘black box’ syndrome

Recent rapid advances in computer software and hardware have provided civil and structural engineers with increasingly powerful means of processing, storing, retrieving and displaying data. Most engineering consultancy firms now rely heavily on computers and software design packages to provide a competitive edge. However, there is a real danger of blind dependence on automated ‘black box’ techniques, the results of which may not be checked against engineering experience and intuition. This paper shows how this can happen and proposes a hierarchy of computer-aided design supervision to avoid potentially fatal errors resulting from flawed computer analysis.