How Arcadis develops next gen structural engineering tools with VIKTOR

• Design/analysis time cut 90-100%
• Structure auto-generated in 4 seconds
• Design variants: 2-3 up to 100-500

Arcadis built the Building Structural Design tool on VIKTOR because most commercial, off-the-shelf structural software is weakest exactly where Arcadis needed the most help: the conceptual and preliminary design stage. As Igor Pecanac, Specialist Engineer at Arcadis, explained: "Most of our work lies within the conceptual and preliminary stages of a design, so those are the areas we want to focus on. These are also the areas where most commercial tooling is lacking."

VIKTOR let Arcadis build a tool tailored to that specific gap: engineers enter an architect's building dimensions, try different structural grid options, and get automatically calculated element sizes for columns, beams, and floors, with a focus on cost and sustainability for projects like gigafactories, warehouses, and data centers.

The tool was also built for adoption across the firm rather than one team, with structural engineers and consultants in different Arcadis regions picking it up for their own work.

Structural engineering at Arcadis, like much of the industry, had a gap in automation specifically at the conceptual and preliminary design stage, the phase where the firm's engineers spend most of their time and where Igor Pecanac, Specialist Engineer at Arcadis, noted that "most commercial tooling is lacking."

That gap made it hard to keep pace with client expectations. As Pecanac put it, "Clients are requesting more information in less time, and engineers need to take more factors into account in the design process, which is only possible if you have tools like this to your avail." Without automation, Arcadis risked falling behind on both speed and the breadth of design options it could responsibly offer clients.

Before the Building Structural Design tool, Arcadis engineers created building designs for the conceptual and preliminary stages by hand, evaluating structural options one at a time using standard engineering software and calculations.

That manual approach limited how much a project could realistically be explored: engineers could typically only evaluate 2 to 3 design variants before a project needed to move forward, even though clients were increasingly requesting more information in less time and expecting more factors to be weighed in the design.

Building the Building Structural Design tool on VIKTOR let Arcadis automate a task that structural engineers previously did by hand. Pecanac explained: "The app automatically generates the structure for you. This would normally be done by a structural engineer themselves. Instead, the app does this in just 4 seconds."

That speed changed how many options Arcadis can realistically explore per project: engineers went from evaluating 2 to 3 design variants to being able to compare 100 to 500, letting the firm design and analyze buildings in 90 to 100% less time than before.

Beyond raw speed, the tool has been built for firm-wide reuse. As Michael van Telgen, Design Automation Specialist at Arcadis, put it, "New technologies like VIKTOR help democratize, standardize, and reuse a lot of knowledge to increase efficiency, productivity, and overall quality of work," and structural engineers and consultants across different Arcadis regions have picked up the tool for their own projects, rather than it staying confined to the team that built it.