OpenSees (the Open System for

Earthquake Engineering Earthquake engineering is an interdisciplinary branch of engineering that designs and analyzes structures, such as buildings and bridges, with earthquakes in mind. Its overall goal is to make such structures more resistant to earthquakes. An earth ...

Simulation) is an

object-oriented Object-oriented programming (OOP) is a programming paradigm based on the concept of " objects", which can contain data and code. The data is in the form of fields (often known as attributes or ''properties''), and the code is in the form of ...

software framework created during the

National Science Foundation The National Science Foundation (NSF) is an independent agency of the United States government that supports fundamental research and education in all the non-medical fields of science and engineering. Its medical counterpart is the National ...

-sponsored era (1997-2007) of the Pacific Earthquake Engineering Research
PEER
Center. OpenSees allows users to create

finite element The finite element method (FEM) is a popular method for numerically solving differential equations arising in engineering and mathematical models, mathematical modeling. Typical problem areas of interest include the traditional fields of struct ...

applications for simulating the response of structural and geotechnical systems subjected to

earthquakes An earthquake (also known as a quake, tremor or temblor) is the shaking of the surface of the Earth resulting from a sudden release of energy in the Earth's lithosphere that creates seismic waves. Earthquakes can range in intensity, fr ...

. This framework was developed by Frank McKenna and

Gregory L. Fenves Gregory Louis Fenves (born March 1, 1957) is a structural engineer, professor and college administrator who is the twenty-first president of Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. Fenves was elected a member of the National Academy of Enginee ...

with significant contributions from Michael H. Scott, Terje Haukaas, Armen Der Kiureghian, Remo M. de Souza, Filip C. Filippou, Silvia Mazzoni, and Boris Jeremic. OpenSees is primarily written in C++ and uses several Fortran numerical libraries for linear equation solving.

Licensing

The license permits use, reproduction, modification, and distribution by educational, research, and non-profit entities for non-commercial purposes only. Use, reproduction, and modification by other entities is allowed for internal purposes only. The UC Regents hold the copyright for OpenSees to be used in commercial distribution.

Usage

Users of OpenSees create applications by writing scripts in either the

Tcl TCL or Tcl or TCLs may refer to: Business * TCL Technology, a Chinese consumer electronics and appliance company ** TCL Electronics, a subsidiary of TCL Technology * Texas Collegiate League, a collegiate baseball league * Trade Centre Limited ...

or Python programming language. OpenSees developers manage the source code a
GitHub

Acronym

The proper acronym capitalization for the "Open System for Earthquake Engineering Simulation" is OpenSees, as opposed to OpenSEES. This reflects the same unconventional capitalization of

History

Prior to taking on the name "OpenSees," the framework was simply called "G3" in reference to the name of th
PEER
research group tasked with simulation development. The doctoral thesis of Frank McKenna on parallel object-oriented structural analysis formed the basis for "G3." Actual Version is 3.3.0 in May 2021.

References

{{Reflist

External links

OpenSees WebpageOpenSeesPy PyPi page
Numerical software Earthquake engineering Finite element software for Linux