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

http://www.labview.com/


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

http://www.mathworks.com/
http://www.mathworks.com/products/matlab/


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

http://www.mathworks.com/
http://www.mathworks.com/products/simulink/