Expertise · Buro Happold
Peter Nugent is an Associate and Lead at Buro Happold in the UK, the development lead of the open-source MidasCivil_Toolkit and a visiting lecturer at UCL. He is an engineer who likes to automate as much of the mundane processes as possible. In this story he tells us why.
In Peter Nugent's own words.
"I believe more of the construction industry should adopt
open source projects and contribute to them."
My early project experiences included manually slicing a 3D AutoCAD file of a doubly curved triangular box girder, importing the points into MidasCivil and drawing each triangular element by hand to create a shell model. One model creation was all it took to convince myself I would never do that again, and I have been automating ever since.
One of my earlier experiences with automating was writing the MidasCivil_Toolkit for the Building and Habitats object Model (BHoM). At the time, MidasCivil did not have APIs available whereas it did have MidasCivil Text (MCT) commands. So I used those to import the text files the BHoM produced when pushing to a model.
I have spent the majority of my career contributing to open-source code such as the BHoM, and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. A lot of duplicate effort is spent producing tools that already exist. That time could be spent contributing to and strengthening existing open-source projects instead.
The MidasCivil_Toolkit, which I have led since 2019, is one of the structural adapters of the BHoM. It supports reading and writing BHoM objects into MidasCivil and has been used on a significant number of bridge projects within the Buro Happold Bridges team. On Bow Bridge Road (2021–2025), a weathering steel arch with a 50 m main span over the River Chelmer, I was project lead; the bridge was modelled using the BHoM and analysed in MidasCivil. At UCL, I run a parametric design course where students learn the BHoM and work in groups to optimise a bridge for a given site against thresholds such as stress limits, clearances and gradients.
When MidasCivil NX was released, we had to decide whether to rewrite the MidasCivil_Toolkit completely around its REST API. I was wary of that. The toolkit had been written over seven years by then, with a lot of historic design decisions, and adding the REST API on top would complicate how it worked and make it harder to maintain. So I decided we would use it only for results, since the previous version required us to export results using specific naming conventions and file directories.
It was actually an intern from Chalmers University I was working with at the time, Emma Sander, who discovered that an MCT upload function was available in the API. We worked together so that users could automatically load the MCT files generated by the toolkit. This not only saved a lot of time but kept the toolkit backwards compatible, because it does not rely directly on the API, which makes it much easier to debug.
Q. What did writing the toolkit change for you?
Authoring the MidasCivil_Toolkit was a definitive shift in the way we approach finite element modelling and use software such as MidasCivil. Because the imports were text based, pushing and pulling was really fast and much easier to debug than with a traditional API.
One hand-drawn shell model was enough for Peter Nugent to start automating. When MidasCivil NX arrived, an MCT upload function in the API let the team keep the MidasCivil_Toolkit backwards compatible instead of rewriting it. That toolkit is open for anyone to use, and Peter Nugent hopes more of the industry will adopt open-source projects like it and contribute to them.