Utility Applications for
Earthquake Engineering Simulation
The applications listed below are general-purpose software tools that
are essential for the integration of laboratory experiments with
computational simulation. These tools permit seamless integration
of physical experimental data with numeric results, and thus facilitate
hybrid physical/computational analyses, experimental design and
verification, flexible numeric simulation, and a broad range of
extensions including signal processing and systems identification.
Labview
Labview is an integrated
set of software tools for data acquisition and analysis. Labview
provides capabilities for acquiring data from virtual instruments,
which are microcomputer-based forms of flexibly-configured software
instruments that readily map to the capability of physical instruments,
but which can easily be upgraded or reconfigured by virtue of their
mutable microcomputer-based architecture. Labview's capabilities
include configurable graphical user-interfaces, powerful
graphical-programming abstractions for automating tasks, support for
common PC-, Mac-, and workstation-based computing platforms, and new
capabilities for embedded systems.
URL's for Labview Information
Matlab
Matlab is an integrated
environment for mathematical and technical computing. Matlab
provides core functions for manipulation, analysis, and visualization
of mathematical data, and also provides considerable extensibility of
these core functions, via user-defined script capabilities and via
pre-packaged toolboxes for many classes of standardized computation
(e.g., signal processing, systems identification, etc.). Matlab
greatly facilitates numeric computation with vectors and matrices,
which makes it a natural for use with engineering problems in general,
and especially those involving matrix-oriented discretizations, e.g.,
implicit finite-element analysis. Matlab also includes a
high-level Applications Programming Interface (API) that permits
extensibility of Matlab function using user-developed
compiled/optimized C and Fortran modules.
URL's for Matlab Information
Simulink
Simulink is an
integrated environment for prototyping and simulating the transient
response of dynamical systems. Simulink is built on MATLAB numeric
capabilities, but provides a high-level view of a system as a
collection of building blocks that can be connected to model a variety
of dynamical systems. Typical Simulink building blocks include
I/O and processing capabilities, and these blocks can be assembled and
recombined in order to prototype real-world systems quickly, cheaply,
and accurately.
URL's for Simulink Information