How can you ensure that cost-cutting measures do not jeopardize the overall safety of a building's structure?

We got to a 90% design and realized that the design was too small! One big part of smart planning involves taking the initiative to learn about other disciplines and what they need. Understand the needs of other disciplines to anticipate future changes. Structural design involves strength and stability checks, but if the design changes, all calculations must be redone. Therefore, err on the side of caution. In a project I worked on, the structural design was done, but the opening was deemed too small for other equipment (doors, hvac, etc.) for an underground tunnel. This foresight avoids repetitive work, saving time and budget, and ensuring the building's safety and integrity.

An innovative design optimization we did was to model the structure on Revit, utilizing Building Information Modeling (BIM). This enabled the greater team to have a 360 degree view of the structure, the ability to zoom in and take sections, which allowed better designs. Some examples to reduce material costs while maintaining structural integrity are to position tension rebars closer to the edge (increasing strength), varying the spacing of shear ties where not needed (where moment is low). In addition, its more design friendly to keep the designs the same where there's minor changes, as foam-works can be reduced and keeps consistency.

Yes! We had a project that typically used 5000 psi concrete but one of the design specs called for a 6000 psi concrete. Instead of simply accepting it, we went back to the drawing board to ask if this was actually necessary. It turned out, the specs were adapted a while ago and at that point the loads were not defined yet. In addition, although we try not to specify #11 bars or Grade 80 (due to cost and constructibility) - when it is needed for structural safety, we include it. This is where selecting material choices are important, knowing when to save the client money, and when it is necessary.

I love using new advanced techniques to better design structures. One way is by incorporating RAG (retrieval augmented generation) in the civil world. Although design can be modeling and preparing calculation packages, a large part of design time is spent on studying documents, reading through construction drawings, specs and technical reports. RAG, a technique where documents are chunked and relevant texts are extracted using vector database similarity search (such as chromadb, pinecone, etc.) coupled with an llm (llama3 / gpt4o), is able to query and compare answers fast. This means you're able to chat and extract information from hundreds of files in seconds. The result? You save time, avoid conflicts, and have a thorough understanding.

Sometimes when a contractor is out on the field, they have suggestions on what can be improved. These are usually constructibility related. Once, we had a case where the contractor wanted to move some rebars around due to there being less space for the concrete to flow around. In this case, we did our due diligence and plotted the PM curves on SAP2000, verified with hand calculations and discovered the new rebar arrangement did not provide adequate strength and had to use a higher grade steel to achieve it. Had we not paid close attention, it may impact the structural integrity of the structure.