Developing extendible component-oriented finite element software

The component-oriented software development can greatly improve the implementation efficiency and ease the extensibility and maintenance of large engineering software. In this paper, a prototype component-oriented software system for structural analysis using the finite element method is presented. The prototype program is completely based on the Component object model that enables the development of modular, object-oriented, customizable and upgradable, distributed programming systems using a number of different programming languages.