Scenario

A government agency, such as a Department of Transportation (DOT), is interested in formalising calculation standards and procedures. The DOT develops structural engineering calculations, which are made broadly available to contractors and field employees engaged in designing and building various transportation structures, including roads and bridges. These standard calculations are vetted documents that inform all approved contractual work commissioned by the DOT. These documents are currently saved in PDF, HTML or often in the native Mathcad Enterprise format in order to provide calculation customisation unavailable through static formats. Version control of the documents is an issue, and engineers must stay up-to-date on Mathcad Enterprise in order to make full use of the worksheets. Otherwise, they must simply make due with versions of the files that provide text and images only, and have no live calculation capabilities.

Problem

How to continue providing up-to-date live calculation documents to a broad audience of offsite users.

Solution

Using the Mathcad Application Server, the DOT can continue to use the same distribution mechanism currently in place, but can instead post all materials in the readily accessible Mathcad Application Server format. Instead of developing multiple formats for the same application, the DOT can create and distribute Mathcad Application Server documents with Web controls-based interactivity. The familiar interface of list boxes and text fields make this solution extremely user friendly and instantly ready for repeated use.

Benefits

• Information can be updated or corrected easily, and the calculations remain up-to-date
• Version control of a document becomes part of an automatic process, thus, saving time
• Offsite users needn't have Mathcad Enterprise installed and can run the calculations on desktop PCs, laptops and high-end mobile devices as long as they have a browser

Conclusion

The Mathcad Application Server allows more people to access DOT's customisable documents. It also reduces the burden on the author to maintain older versions of a document or to worry about which engineers are not receiving the most up-to-date information. The task of maintaining a standard body of calculations for field use is streamlined and the error factor involved is significantly reduced.

<< Previous | Next >>