"Integrated Bridge Design" is a technique in which the two major numerical processes in bridge design are brought together. This means that the process of code checking structural components ("Design") and the process of analysing the structure for moments and shears ("Analysis") communicate in a very structured way. This leads to great increases in productivity for bridge designers, saving them both time and effort.

The concept is very obvious: any program that designs a beam has full knowledge of all the beam's self weights and member properties, and just needs tables of moments and shears to become useful. Equally, any program that analyses bridge structures needs section properties to be useful. So if the analysis program can read weight and section property data from the design program, and can export moment and shear results back to the design program, then the task is accomplished.

It sounds simple, but there are few vendors who market both design and analysis programs. In the UK there are probably two or three commercially available design programs and six or seven commercially available analysis programs, and even fewer can effectively handle the strict requirements of BS 5400 and BD 37/01 and their derivatives. In fact, SAM-LEAP5 is unique in this respect.

The benefits of Integrated Bridge Design are:

• A more focused approach to design, considering one detail or beam at a time.
• Section properties of complex beams are calculated automatically and re-calculated when sections change.
• Grillage or finite element parameters can easily be changed at any time in the process with very little extra work.
• Simple generation of influence surfaces for any beam, element or "Composite Member" (described in case study #1) and powerful integrated load optimisation ensures fast and reliable production of all necessary load effects.
• The time saved by effective modelling can be used to cut project delivery times and save money.

In short, Integrated Bridge Design represents the cutting edge of bridge design technology.