Our History
The Bridge Software Institute (BSI) is headquartered at the University
of Florida (UF) in Gainesville, Florida. It was established in January 2000 to oversee
the development of bridge related software products at UF. The goals of the BSI
include enhancement, maintenance, and dissemination of bridge software to address
the increasing demands on the transportation industry. The BSI also anticipates
the future needs of the nation-wide transportation community in the digital environment,
by the development and promotion of the Data Interchange for Geotechnical and GeoEnvironmental
Specialists (DIGGS) and the design of a corresponding DIGGS database. The BSI is
also dedicated to providing technical assistance with the software under the Institute's
auspices.
We place particular emphasis on high fidelity computational modeling and its application
in advancing the basic computational methods to tackle new scientific challenges
on new generations of large scale bridge engineering problems. The thrust of institutional
research activities is the development of powerful computational codes and their
application to the solutions of large scale bridge engineering problems through
inter-disciplinary research and development in collaboration with the Structural/Geotechnical
Research Groups in the Department of Civil and Coastal Engineering at the University
of Florida. One of the main strengths of the institute and one for which it is nationally
recognized, is in nonlinear dynamic finite element analysis and its applications
to solving large-scale extreme event problems.
Since 2003, the BSI has developed a robust database system that integrates the application
of geotechnical engineering data and associated metadata which enables the construction
of services in the digital environment. The FDOT Database System is now being used
in large-scale implementations, with more applications under development. The BSI
is also leading in the DIGGS project. DIGGS is a coalition of government agencies,
universities and industry partners whose focus is on the creation and maintenance
of an international data transfer standard for transportation related data. The
coalition came into existence through coordination with the U.S. Federal Highway
Administration who sponsored meetings and eventually formed the pooled fund study
project.
This unique intellectual and creative combination of academia, government, and industry
energizes the work of our faculty, staff, and our students. As BSI moves further
into the 21st century, I expect the institute to continue to succeed and to produce
new generations of robust engineering software and thus to provide reliable engineering
resolution to the community of bridge engineering in the world.
Jay H. Jung, Ph.D.
Director
