FINGER: A Symbolic System for Automatic Generation of Numerical Programs in Finite Element Analysis

AbstractFINGER is a LISP-based system to derive formulas needed in finite element analysis, and to generate FORTRAN code from these formulas. The generated programs can be used with existing, FORTRAN-based finite element analysis packages. This approach aims to replace tedious hand computations that are time consuming and error prone. The design and implementation of FINGER are presented. Techniques for generating efficient code are discussed. These include automatic intermediate expression labelling, interleaving formula derivation with code generation, exploiting symmetry through generated functions and subroutines. Current capabilities include generation of material matrices, strain-displacement matrices and stiffness matrices. FINGER contains a package, called GENTRAN, that translates symbolic formulas into FORTRAN. GENTRAN can generate functions, subroutines and entire programs. Thus, it is also of interest as a general-purpose FORTRAN code generator, Aside from the finite element application, the techniques developed and employed are useful for automatic code generation in general