Ramboll automated engineering design with Speckle

Ramboll is a global engineering, architecture and consultancy company with more than 18,000 experts that create sustainable solutions for governments and companies all over the world.

They combine insights with the power to drive positive change to our clients, in the form of ideas that can be realised and implemented.

Their chief Speckler is Iman Warsame, Product Owner at Ramboll, who works in the transport sector with his team, which is split between the UK and Denmark.

Iman's Soufflé project was inspired by a wastewater plant with many truss bridges carrying pipes, and the existing workflow for the preliminary design stage was quite manual (lots of copy-pasting of information).

The team was dealing with different types of truss bridges and structures, which was challenging. This is how they came across MANGO - a suite of software developed by Ramboll in 2015 to design motorway gantries in the UK.

MANGO successfully created 95% of the UK’s gantries between 2015 and 2020 and helped the team gather much knowledge about truss bridges. Consequently, the MANGO suite inspired Iman and his team to name the rest of their projects.

Soufflé aims to automate structural analysis by running all the necessary checks and exporting calculations in a digestible Word document, giving engineers maximum workflow transparency.

An essential part of Soufflé is Coco, a neutral internal code library designed to work with Eurocode. Many of Iman’s projects involved lots of trusses that needed to be designed, which led to the following tasks:

• Handling data in Grasshopper
• Drawings in Revit
• Doing an analysis of design in FEA, and do it quickly

How do we get all these things to work together? That’s where Speckle comes in.

Iman and his team worked with Grasshopper, Revit, and Soulfflé, and they did it consistently thanks to Speckle. Each team member could work with their favourite tool while efficiently coordinating workflows and collaborating on their outputs.

The data extraction was useful, but Speckle also enables you to use the best application for whatever you’re doing. You can switch things in and out quite easily. I realised it was possible to switch out Grasshopper and design your bridge in Python ‍

Iman Warsame

On top of that, the Viewer was helpful in check interfaces as well as the raw data. The team was able to focus on being great engineers and deliver the following goals:

• Perform parametric truss generation
• Adapt MANGO and use Soufflé for structural analyses
• Automate BIM model generation
• Smoothly collaborate between disciplines and software

Iman shares his views on the future of Soufflé and the next focus points:

• Geometry: generative truss design
• Analysis: adapt to Danish standards
• Drawings/Models: make detailed drawing generation automatic