Data driven design- a vision for an automated approach

Geotechnical calculation procedures require engineers to assign values to a number of input parameters. Usually there are a number of well-defined input parameters with clear guidance on how values should be assigned. However, there are also often a small number of less well defined parameters with little, if any, guidance given on how values should be selected; "engineering judgment" is required. It should, there-fore, not be surprising that there is strong evidence to demonstrate that geotechnical engineers given the same data and same design task will interpret the data in very different ways and ultimately produce vastly different design calculations. This is clearly unsatisfactory as a vital step in producing reliable and cost effective geo-infrastructure is to develop design procedures that can be applied with consistency. This paper will discuss a web based application that uses CPT or CPTu data directly as an input and performs a lateral analysis of pile foundation. The application interprets that CPT data and automatically assigns appropriate p-y curves for sands, silts or clays. In principle, the application requires no engineering judgment to analyse a pile founda-tion, other than to decide if the CPT data is appropriate for the task. This is likely to lead to more consistent and ultimately reliable designs.