Advance Design 2027 Open API — Reimagining Structural Engineering Workflows

Structural Analysis as Part of the Digital Workflow

For years, structural engineering software has evolved primarily through stronger analysis engines, faster calculations, and more rigorous design verification. Yet despite these advances, the way engineers interact with structural software has remained surprisingly unchanged: create a model manually, define loads manually, run calculations manually, and repeat the entire cycle each time the project changes.

In today’s engineering environment, that approach is increasingly becoming a constraint rather than a workflow.

Projects are delivered under tighter deadlines. Investors expect broader design exploration. BIM coordination demands continuous synchronisation between disciplines. Large engineering firms seek standardisation and repeatability; smaller teams look for ways to eliminate repetitive work and concentrate expertise where it genuinely creates value.

With Advance Design 2027, Graitec introduces a significant step toward addressing these demands: the Advance Design Open API.

This is not simply another import/export interface or a scripting add-on. It is a modern, fully open REST API that transforms Advance Design from a standalone FEM application into a programmable structural analysis platform — one that can be connected to BIM systems, automation scripts, optimisation engines, custom company tools, dashboards, cloud services, or AI-driven engineering processes.

From Manual Modeling to Engineering Automation

Traditionally, engineers interacted with FEM software almost exclusively through the graphical user interface. Every beam, support, load case, and combination had to be defined directly inside the application. This workflow is intuitive and effective for individual projects. However, once work becomes repetitive, parametric, or data-driven, manual interaction quickly becomes a bottleneck.

The Open API fundamentally changes this paradigm.

Rather than manually operating the software, engineers can now orchestrate it programmatically. Advance Design becomes a calculation engine that responds to external instructions — instructions that may originate from a simple Python script, a C# engineering application, a BIM integration tool, a cloud-based configurator, an optimisation algorithm, or a company-specific automation platform.

The practical impact of this shift is concrete. Repetitive modelling tasks can be automated. Hundreds of structural variants can be analysed without manual intervention. Results are returned as structured datasets, ready for custom reporting, dashboards, or downstream processing. Structural analysis can, for the first time, integrate naturally into modern digital engineering ecosystems.

In practice, the Open API allows engineering teams to move from working inside software toward designing workflows around engineering logic.

Built on Modern Industry Standards

One of the most important aspects of the Open API is not only what it does, but how it does it.

The API is based on REST architecture — the same technology underpinning modern cloud platforms, enterprise systems, and software ecosystems worldwide. Communication is handled through JSON, and the entire interface is described using the OpenAPI (Swagger) specification.

This architectural choice carries meaningful consequences. Because any programming language capable of sending HTTP requests can communicate with Advance Design — whether Python, C#, JavaScript, Java, Go, or TypeScript — engineering teams are not locked into a proprietary toolchain. The solution is compatible with existing company infrastructure and remains relevant as technology evolves.

Equally important is the self-documenting nature of the OpenAPI specification. It allows automatic generation of client libraries, documentation, testing tools, and integration templates. Graitec also provides ready-to-run examples in both Python and C#, significantly reducing the entry barrier for teams beginning their automation journey.

What Can Be Controlled Through the API?

The Open API exposes the core workflows of Advance Design across four principal domains.

• Project Management covers the full project lifecycle at the session level: creating projects, opening and closing them, and managing sessions programmatically — giving external applications full control over the working environment.
• Structural Modelling provides the ability to define materials, create sections, generate both linear and planar elements, define supports, create openings in slabs and walls, and manage element properties including eccentricities.
• Load Definition allows creation of load cases and families, definition of point, linear, and surface loads, and generation of load combinations in accordance with design standards. A particularly powerful feature within this domain is automatic climatic load generation. Wind and snow loads can be generated directly through the API, with support for Eurocode, Canadian, and American standards.
• Analysis and Results Extraction closes the loop. The API supports launching FEM calculations and retrieving results as structured data — displacements, internal forces, and stresses. These structured outputs are well suited to dashboards, reporting systems, optimisation workflows, or machine learning pipelines.

Practical Engineering Applications

The real value of the Open API becomes visible when applied to concrete engineering problems. The following scenarios illustrate how this technology can reshape everyday workflows.

Automated Industrial Hall Generation

Engineering offices that repeatedly design industrial halls, warehouses, logistics buildings, or steel frame structures face a familiar challenge: whilst each project differs in its specifics, the workflow is nearly identical every time. Geometry is defined, frames are created, sections are assigned, purlins are generated, loads are applied, analysis is run, and sections are optimised.

With the Open API, this entire process can be driven by a simple configurator. From a small set of input parameters — span, building height, roof slope, number of bays, frame spacing, snow region, wind category — the API can create the geometry, assign materials and sections, generate climatic loads, launch the analysis, and export the results. What previously required hours of repetitive modelling can be reduced to a matter of seconds, freeing engineers to focus on optimisation, engineering judgement, coordination, and decision-making.

Parametric Design and Variant Exploration

In many projects, the first structural concept is rarely the optimal one. Engineers routinely compare different spans, materials, grid layouts, section sizes, and stiffness configurations — but traditional workflows limit the number of variants that can realistically be tested, because every option requires additional manual work.

The Open API removes this constraint. A script can evaluate twenty steel section combinations across five roof slopes and three frame spacings, under multiple loading scenarios, generating hundreds of design alternatives automatically overnight. The following morning, the engineering team has access to utilisation ratios, steel tonnage, deflections, stability results, and cost comparisons for the full set of variants. This transforms structural design from sequential trial-and-error into genuine data-driven optimisation.

Seamless BIM Synchronisation

One of the most persistent challenges in BIM workflows is maintaining synchronisation between analytical and coordination models. In many organisations, engineers still rely on repeated file exports and imports between platforms — a process that is time-consuming, error-prone, and difficult to sustain throughout the project lifecycle.

Using the Open API, companies can develop direct integrations between Advance Design and their BIM environments. Optimised sections from Advance Design can automatically update BIM models; structural changes in BIM platforms can regenerate analytical models; and coordination models can remain continuously synchronised. In large multidisciplinary projects, where coordination speed directly affects project profitability, this kind of connected pipeline offers substantial operational value.

Custom Reporting and Engineering Dashboards

Many engineering organisations use highly customised reporting workflows. Standard software reports are frequently insufficient because clients require company-specific formats, managers need KPI dashboards, and internal quality assurance systems demand structured data integration.

Without automation, engineers often spend considerable time manually transferring results into spreadsheets or project documentation. With the Open API, analysis results become structured engineering data that can be routed automatically into Excel templates, Power BI dashboards, cloud databases, PDF generators, or internal project management systems. Beyond time savings, this approach improves the traceability, repeatability, and reliability of engineering documentation — and gives engineering managers immediate visibility into project status and structural performance metrics.

A Foundation for Future Engineering Technologies

Perhaps the most strategic implication of the Open API is not what it automates today, but what it enables tomorrow. Structural engineering is increasingly influenced by generative design, AI-assisted workflows, cloud computation, and optimisation algorithms — all of which require software systems that are open, programmable, and interoperable.

By exposing its core capabilities through a modern REST API, Advance Design positions itself as a platform ready for this evolution. Engineering teams can build proprietary automation tools, develop custom engineering platforms, integrate optimisation engines, connect machine learning pipelines, or create client-facing engineering configurators. The software becomes more than an application — it becomes infrastructure for engineering innovation.

Conclusion

The introduction of the Advance Design 2027 Open API marks a meaningful evolution in structural engineering software. It transforms structural analysis from an isolated desktop activity into a programmable, connected, and scalable engineering process.

The value of this transformation extends well beyond faster modelling. It lies in enabling fundamentally different ways of working — automated structural generation, parametric design exploration, continuous BIM synchronisation, integrated reporting, and the groundwork for AI-driven engineering processes.

As engineering projects continue to grow in complexity, the ability to automate, integrate, and scale workflows will increasingly define competitive advantage. With the Open API, Advance Design 2027 takes a concrete step into this future — not merely as FEM software, but as a structural engineering platform built for the next generation of digital workflows.