ICT TRAINING APPROACH FOR THE STRUCTURAL STEEL
DESIGN UNDER THE EUROCODES
Miguel A. Serrano, Carlos López-Colina, Fernando L. Gayarre
Manuel L. Aenlle and Alfonso Lozano
Department of Construction, Oviedo University, Campus de Viesques, Gijón, Spain
Keywords: Training web site, Structural steelwork design, ICT-based learning, Vocational training.
Abstract: Fortunately the design processes of steel buildings across Europe is eventually covered by a unified code:
The Eurocode 3: “Design of steel structures“. Nevertheless, although Eurocodes will soon become
mandatory documents, designs will not be standardized because each country has a set of National Annexes
which must be taking into account when designing in that particular country. Furthermore every country
also has its own body of non-conflicting complementary information. A problem then arises when engineers
need to produce designs in other European countries, either for a company based in one state or as
individuals. Also, allowing engineers time out of the office for attendance at the intensive training courses
which are required for earning experience on the new codes of design, frequently represents an obstacle for
their employers. In an attempt to solve these problems, a strong trans-national partnership has been working
on a project which aims to develop an ICT-supported, flexible training approach to allow designers to apply
Eurocodes in accordance with the national regulations and practices of different member states. The
resulting material shows how to design a typical building according to the different national contexts. The
developed portal incorporates facilities for course presentation, forums, blogs and on-line translation.
1 INTRODUCTION
The European Codes of design for structural steel
and composite buildings, designated as Eurocodes 3
and 4, EN 1993 (2005), EN 1994 (2005), will soon
become mandatory documents in all European
countries. Nevertheless, designs of buildings will not
be standardised. Each country has a set of national
annexes which provide specific mandatory factors
which must be used when designing a building in
that particular country.
Every country will also have some non-
conflicting complementary information (NCCI),
including normal practice and other legislation such
as Health and Safety, which will again take into
account national variations in design approaches.
In order for engineers to produce designs in their
own country, they will need to be aware of both the
national annexes and the NCCIs, and read these
alongside the Eurocodes.
In order to be realised the vision inspired by the
Eurocodes of real mobility across Europe, designers
must have access to thorough information about the
design processes in the country they are working in.
At national level, issues have also been identified
concerning the training of engineers to design
according to the new Eurocodes.
Engineers are demanding training strategies that
allow them to adapt as quickly and efficiently as
possible to the described situation. The time out of
the office to allow engineers attend the intensive
training courses frequently represents a problem for
their employers.
This need has encouraged the formation of an
experienced trans-European partnership which has
been producing appropriate and flexible training
material on these subjects for more than ten years.
The team has worked on four projects producing
training material in a variety of formats for the new
Codes relating to structural steelwork. This paper
covers the work of the most recent project which has
produced web-based, self-learning training courses.
2 THE INITIATIVE EUR-ING
Eur-Ing is a 2 year pilot project part-funded by the
European Commission under the second phase of the
Leonardo Da Vinci programme that has been
running from October 2006 to October 2008. Its full
282
Serrano M., Løspez-Colina C., Gayarre F., Aenlle M. and Lozano A.
ICT TRAINING APPROACH FOR THE STRUCTURAL STEEL DESIGN UNDER THE EUROCODES.
DOI: 10.5220/0001827502820287
In Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Web Information Systems and Technologies (WEBIST 2009), page
ISBN: 978-989-8111-81-4
Copyright
c
 2009 by SCITEPRESS – Science and Technology Publications, Lda. All rights reserved

title is ‘Development of ICT supported, flexible
training to enable designers to apply Eurocodes in
accordance with the national regulations of different
member states’.
2.1 The Aim
The main Eur-Ing project aim was to provide the
necessary information for designers from any
European country to produce easily a steel building
design in other European countries.
The building chosen as the basis for the case
study was a real steel-framed multi-storey building
originally designed to UK national codes. The
project partners re-designed the building according
to the national annex clauses and NCCIs of their
own country. We also considered the national
regulations and standard practice of each one of the
partner countries regarding procurement,
construction and health and safety legislation. The
design brief and basic building form is standard, but
each partner country made detailed modifications to
ensure compliance with normal practice in their
country.
Professor Bijlaard, Chairman of CEN and
responsible for all the structural Eurocodes on steel,
presented a paper (Bijlaard, 2008) in one of the
invited lecturers at the Eurosteel’08 Conference. It
could be interesting to extract one of its sentences,
which appears in the conclusion:
“The introduction of the Eurocodes in the design
practice needs great care. Design examples,
guidelines, design tools (special software) should be
developed in the various countries. Explanations of
differences and the justification for these changes
should be supplied to support the acceptation of the
Eurocodes.”
The above paragraph is the aim of the Eur-Ing
project and it shows how this project is very
valuable.
2.2 The Resources
The following resources have been produced:
 A complete building design for each country
involved in the project incorporating national
annex and NCCI criteria.
 A Technical Description explaining the design
approach in each country. This has been
translated into all the partner country
languages.
 An explanation of the non-technical issues
which need to be taken into account when
procuring and designing a building in a
particular country. This will include links to
useful documents including legislative. This
document has also been translated into all the
partner languages.
 A comparative list of the major differences
between the national annex clauses for the
Eurocode 3 and Eurocode 4 in each partner
country.
The project has ended in September 2008. It is
intended that all the information produced will be
hosted on the project website. This will include the
facility to compare procurement and design
approaches and national annexes in different
countries.
2.3 The Partnership
The participating partners in this project that include
university departments, information and research
centres, professional bodies and companies from
several European countries were:
 UK - University of Sheffield
 UK - The Steel Construction Institute
 UK - Epistemics Ltd
 Germany - Fachgebiet Stahlbau TU Darmstadt
 Belgium - Centre Information Acier
 Greece - Technical Chamber of Greece
 Greece - IEKEM
 Spain - Fundación Universidad de Oviedo
 Hungary - University of Pécs
 Slovakia - Slovak University of Technology
In order to ensure that the material produced in
this project is appropriate and in a suitable format
for designers and companies, each partner country
has an advisory (Steering) committee which
provides valuable feedback at key stages of the
project. The steering committees comprise large and
small design companies, steel fabricators, trainers
and contracting organisations.
3 THE EUR-ING WEBSITE
Originally, the material for this project was going to
be uploaded on the NFATEC website. NFATEC was
a previous project about an educational
dissemination of Eurocodes that was carried out by
many of the partners of Eur-Ing. However,
experience showed that web technology significantly
advanced and much more could be accomplished by
using the product Drupal (http://drupal.org). To use
this technology, a web server that supported
database access and scripting was configured at
http://n-aktive.co.uk. The n-AKTive server was seen
as a portal to host the project material (Figure 1).
The capability of Drupal allowed so much
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283

Figure 1: The n-AKTive portal. Links to Eur-Ing resources.
additional functionality that was simply adopted and
used. The product could:
 Facilitate the translation of the material.
 Provide a good Community of Practice with
the associated Forums, Blogs, Comments and
Tagging.
 Support structuring of material in a simple
Taxonomy to allow structured classification
and searching.
 Allow online editing of material by approved
users.
 Allow collaborative working on content such
as e-Books.
 Allow customised design of forms.
 Support RSS, or Really Simple Syndication.
This is a method of sharing and broadcasting
content such as news from a website. Using
XML, items such as news articles can be
automatically downloaded into a News Reader
or published onto another website.
 Allow users to interact with one another and to
see what other users found useful. This is a
bit like “users that purchased this item also
purchased this other item” on sites like
Amazon.
 Be able to be extended by adding new modules
to add new functionality.
 Control the addition of content by users who
had not been validated to reduce the amount of
“spam” or unwanted advertising on the site (a
common practice with a whole industry
growing up to pollute websites).
 Allow users to configure their own view of the
site – a workbench if you like.
 Be able to delegate activities to allow more
than one person to perform administration
actions such as “Moderating the Forums” as
the site grew.
 Have a Calendar to keep users informed of
events.
 Deliver sufficient statistics to allow the owners
of the site to make informed decisions about
the content.
 Conform to standards to ensure that its content
could be shared using emerging technology
(RSS feeds, Blog readers, Widgets and many
more).
 Allow Semantic tagging to cut across the
barriers of language.
 Allow easy addition of new languages.
 Allow the individual partners to extend the
content if they thought it appropriate.
 Allow the site to be easily moved if it became
necessary in the future.
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 Be scalable to handle many thousands of pages
with many thousands of users (proved by the
products themselves where the sites are
implemented in their own product and have
tens of thousands of users with hundreds of
thousands of pages).
The project has developed a series of resources
that allow the user to compare the design of similar
steel-framed multi-storey buildings as the one
chosen as the Eur-Ing study. This covers:
 National Context, that presents the local
regulatory conditions and current practice
under which building procurement, design and
construction takes place and allows the user to
see the differences which influence design
decisions.
 Example Designs for “The Bioincubator”, a
medium-rise office building. These designs
have the same architectural specification and
are presented for a number of countries
including those with seismic requirements. The
examples include detailed design of principal
elements.
 The National Annexes (where available) for
each country, that have been complied in an
interactive tabular form. It allows the user to
compare specific clauses taken from the
Eurocodes 3 and 4 with those from one, two or
more countries at the same time.
 A Journey Through Design which provides a
structured description of a route through the
design decision process and links to specific
guidance within the major information source
Access-Steel (Access-Steel, 2006).
n-AKTive provides access to e-Learning
materials developed by leading industrial and
academic experts within the EU. It also provides a
forum for discussion and collaboration with regard
to multiple EU-sponsored initiatives such as Eur-
Ing, (Gonzalez et al., 2008), (Iványi et al., 2008),
(Serrano et al., 2008), the SSEDTA project, (Ssedta,
2002) and the NFATEC project, (Nfatec, 2004),
(Serrano et al., 2005).
It is to be noted that the material developed for
SSEDTA and NFATEC, two previous projects
related to the learning of Eurocodes, have been
transferred on the n-AKTive web site in order to
provide the necessary basic information to the users.
Although it was a project within the European
scope, at least initially, and the content of the
web is mainly aimed to people that need to work
with the European codes, to date the authenticated
users come from beyond the European borders.
There were registrants from 38 countries all around
the world. Obviously the main effort in
dissemination was done among the partner’s
countries and most of registrations are from these
states. But it is worth noting that an important rate
near to 20% has its origin in other European
countries (Portugal, Italy, France and Netherlands
just to mention the highest rates). Also there were an
important number of registrants from Asia 5%
(India, Singapore and South Korea are the more
representative), from America 4% (Brazil, Canada
and Mexico mainly), and even from Oceania 2% and
some people from South Africa. Figure 2 shows the
percentage of registrations in the web site depending
on the origin.
During the 3 day period of the last trial web
course, our site was linked to from more than one
hundred other sites (some of them linked to general
Figure 2: Origin of registrations in n-AKTive web site.
search engines but most of them really focussed in
the topic of steel structures as:
 http://www.eurocodes.co.uk
 http://www.infosteel.be.
 http://www.access-steel.com
 http://eurocodes.jrc.ec.europa.eu
 http://portal.tee.gr/portal/
4 WEB-BASED COURSE: JTD
The Journey Through Design (now referred to as
JTD) is a resource designed to provide links to
information on relevant aspects of the design of a
steel structure to Eurocode 3 and 4. Its structured
format is intended to help the selection of the
appropriate information through a sequential
method.
The initial idea behind producing this resource
follows this scenario:
A graduate or student in civil engineering is
presented with a design brief outlining a problem
Europe (partners) Europe (rest)
Asia Oceania
America Africa
ICT TRAINING APPROACH FOR THE STRUCTURAL STEEL DESIGN UNDER THE EUROCODES
285

Figure 3: The n-AKTive portal. The Journey Trough Design tool.
that he is unsure how to solve. The graduate would
ask a more senior member of his team for initial
ideas on how to work out the problem and the
response would be to look in a text book or at a
website.
This resource is to be designed to eliminate or
reduce the need to consult another colleague by
providing a central hub containing a collection of
links to selected information in a user friendly
layout.
Figure 3 shows: The Journey Trough Design tool
included in the n-AKTive portal.
4.1 JTD Resources
The resources in the JTD (with few exceptions) have
not been produced by the makers of the JTD. Whilst
every effort has been made to make sure that the
information is correct, the resources linked to should
be used as learning tools only. More information is
specified on the producers' of resources website. A
list is provided below.
 Access-steel.co.uk
 Communities.gov.uk
 Energysavingtrust.org.uk
The resources provided are PDF documents.
Clicking a link will take you to the relevant page in
the document. Due to the nature of different
operating systems or configurations, the page
number has been provided as well. Each resource
has a primary link that refers to the first page of the
document. Where pages have been specially selected
(and highlighted within the JTD) the link refers the
user to the respective page within the resource. It
should be noted that each link opens up a new
document.
Depending on the user preferences, the resources
in the JTD tool and the documents linked are also
available in several partner languages. Access Steel
web page recognizes which country you are
accessing it from and displays the appropriate
language version of the page.
4.2 Design Exercise
A design exercise has been produced to allow the
user learn by carrying out a simple task. It is a
simple design brief purposed to try out the Eur-Ing
material, that consists on a multi-storey
administration building similar to the Bio-Incubator.
It is planned to be developed using the JTD tool. To
this purpose, the work is divided into six tasks to be
followed by the user.
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 Initial design decisions: aspects such as floor to
floor heights and local regulations.
 Choosing a grid: this section provides
information such as what form the building
will take, the selection of building elements
and how they are constructed.
 Selection of loading: this section includes
information on loading types.
 Perform analysis: it introduces ideas such as
'Simple' construction.
 Element design: the design of the individual
elements themselves. Figure 3 shows an
example of the JTD tool interface.
 Refine design: design is an iterative process
and it is important to ensure that any changes
made during the design stages still satisfy the
original design requirements.
5 CONCLUSIONS
The main outcome in the Eur-Ing project was the
production of a innovative multi-national approach
to the design of real steel buildings. Typical worked
examples available in this field are country-specific
and do not describe how national annexes and local
applications and regulations affect the design
process in different countries, resulting usually in
different solutions.
The web site produced for this purpose has
showed to be really useful for practitioners in
industry and other target groups identified in the
project, who have been demanding more efficient
ways to learn and familiarize themselves to the
European codes of practice.
By means of a trans-national methodology of
working, it has been discovered that, not only
differences in codes and annexes but also variations
in design and construction practice, planning
procedures, procurement routes and other factors
contribute to diverse national design approaches.
The availability of such innovative reference and
learning material in seven European languages will
facilitate the mobility of designers and the ability of
organisations to operate under the regulations and
traditions of other countries by increasing
confidence.
After several on-line pilot courses held to date,
feedback from attendants assures that the developed
product agrees with the project’s objectives.
The partnership is intending to get funding from
the steel industry to maintain the existing web and to
extend the project to some more European countries
producing more language versions.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The project was carried out with the financial
support of the European Commission under the
Leonardo Da Vinci programme. This help is
gratefully acknowledged. The authors would also
like to thank all the partnership for their work and
enthusiastic contributions.
REFERENCES
Access steel website, 2006. Eurocodes make easy.
http://www.access-steel.com/
Bijlaard, F.S.K., 2008. Eurocode 3. Present status and
further developments. Proceedings Eurosteel’08,
Graz. Austria.
CEN/TC250 N518, 2003. Nationally determined
parameters and National Annexes for EN Eurocodes.
Drupal official website, http://drupal.org/.
EN 1993: 2005. Eurocode 3: “Design of steel structures“.
Part 1-1: “General rules and rules for buildings“. Part
1-2: “Structural fire design”. Part 1-8: “Design of
joints“.
EN 1994: 2005. Eurocode 4: “Design of composite
structures“. Part 1-1: “General rules and rules for
buildings“. Part 1-2: “Structural fire design”.
González, F., Lange, J., 2008. Harmonization of Design
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Serrano, M.A., Burgess, I.W. and Armstrong, S.E. 2005.
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