The Florida Department of Transportation Selects Mathsoft's Mathcad to Perform and Manage Design Calculations

The Structures Design Office within the Florida Department of Transportation (FDOT) will now standardise on Mathsoft™'s Mathcad® software. The FDOT now has Mathcad available to all its structural engineers for use in creating, updating and verifying the calculations behind the critical infrastructure of the state. 

The FDOT employs more than 100 structural engineers and is responsible for design work associated with 6,319 bridges as well as 4,000 overhead sign structures and more than 10,000 signal structures. With these heavy responsibilities, the FDOT structural engineers must constantly be performing, revising and approving calculations, often based on the work of others. To be effective, these calculations must be precise and easily communicated across a department, up the management chain and to outside parties. Using Mathcad templates, the FDOT can distribute fully documented analyses between designers. Mathcad lets the engineers perform, update and share calculations in their intuitive, maths-based format, providing instant context and enduring utility.

"In our department, one major responsibility is to author and publish the structural engineering software specific to Florida's infrastructure needs," said Andre Pavlov, senior structural engineer in the FDOT's Structures Design Office. "We perform the calculations with Mathcad and capture the logic and reasoning as well as the results. Now engineers have access to documented math detail and can avoid having to reinvent the wheel every time a design needs to be created or reviewed."

"Responsible for the creation and maintenance of tens of thousands of highway miles and more than six thousand bridges, the Florida Department of Transportation is in a situation where its work is critical to the well-being and everyday functions of all Florida residents and out-of-state travellers," said Allen Razdow, senior vice president of strategic planning at Mathsoft. "By standardising on Mathcad, the agency is providing its engineers with the tools they need to perform and share critical calculations and design processes and ultimately complete projects more effectively and with less chance of error."

Mathcad 11 is supplied and supported in the UK, Ireland, Denmark and Norway by Adept Scientific plc, Amor Way, Letchworth, Herts. SG6 1ZA; telephone (01462) 480055, fax (01462) 480213, email mathcad@adeptscience.co.uk; or see Adept's World Wide Web site http://www.adeptscience.co.uk/. Adept Scientific is one of the world's leading suppliers of software and hardware products for research, scientific, engineering and technical applications on desktop computers.

With offices in the UK, USA, Germany and throughout the Nordic region, Adept Scientific is one of the world's leading suppliers of software and hardware products for research, scientific, engineering and technical applications on desktop computers.