Bridges

This paper presents the findings of a Design Scholar as part of their final year research thesis at
the Aurecon Design Academy - an internal accelerator learning programme aimed at achieving
technical mastery and design excellence among Aurecon’s top senior design, engineering, and
advisory practitioners. The programme runs for three-years in collaboration with RMIT.

Through a comprehensive analysis of an existing project-specific computational design script
developed by Aurecon's international Bridges and Civil Structures capability, the study aimed to
develop a modularised framework for future development of scripts for automated structural
analysis.

The script developed for the Wēiti River Bridge as part of the O Mahurangi - Penlink project was
chosen for detailed mapping and analysis. The bridge itself is a long-span extradosed bridge with
an overall length of 535 metres. The script was developed using the visual scripting platform
Grasshopper to fully parameterise the bridge structure geometry and design variables to carry out
analysis modelling in Midas Civil, as well as contribute to the Building Information Models (BIM).

The research found that while computational design methods are embedded as business as usual
in Building Information Models (BIM) throughout the industry, there is significant work to be done in for analysis and structural design. The Wēiti River Bridge script was successfully mapped into its
component modules which was then used as a basis for a framework for future script development
that is scalable and covers a variety of bridge types. The process also informed the identification
standard modules for future development.