Management Information Systems in Structural Engineering

The definition of Management Information Systems (MIS) is a planned system of the collecting, processing, storing and disseminating data in the form of information needed to carry out the functions of management. The term usually refers to business operations not engineering. However, over the past several years engineers have started to develop systems that not only convey basic design (2 dimensional) data but multi-dimensional data. The foray into multi-dimensional data systems is allowing engineers to see their projects and decisions in ways that were never possible or dreamed of. The reason for these efforts is that amount of data that an engineer generates for any given project has grown far beyond what the normal human brain can grasp and make decisions on in a reasonable amount of time. So there is an attempt to filter, organize, store, manipulate and manage data down to a level understandable by humans, in other words MIS in Structural Engineering. My presentation will introduce MIS concepts and provide an example of a MIS in structural engineering. The example is the design of an edge girder for a cable-stayed bridge. The girder design contained millions of records of forces, moments, lengths, etc. for every half floor-beam spacing point along the length of the girder. This pile of data was collected, organized and filtered down to only a few thousand lines that captured the essential information for a thorough design effort.