C.S.E. is interfaced with Sap2000 and with Castalia's software Sargon, and is its natural completion. Since the end of the 90s, as aldready said, we are working to this project, which originally was merely to add a post processor for steel connections to Sargon. Actually, now C.S.E. can work with or without Sargon or Sap2000 (the two fem programs it presently is interfaced with), as a stand alone tool, and its importance is so relevant that it will surely be interfaced with other software packages, worlwide available.

The C.S.E. project is very ambitious: instead of developing a program which is able to manage only a given number of possible preset joints (cooking recipes approach), C.S.E. faces the steel connection problem in a very very general way: aim of the program is to allow the automatic or semi-automatic check of the steel structures joints (connections) which have been defined via a free placement of the components: joined (members), joiners (welds and bolts), and throughs (plates of the most general kind, stiffeners, angles, generic or normalized cross-shapes trunk, like IPE, HEA, HEB, HEM, W, M, UNP, composed, cold-formed, generic... really one of the more than 10,000 cross-section in the archive, or, via SAMBA, any possible composition of these cross-sections). Semi-automatic checks can be added to those, very general, performed automatically by the program, for a real customization of the program work. Automatic checks already present in the software manage a very wide class of joints, as there is a simlified fem model able to manage any possible configuration, and bolts, welds, net-sections, bolt-bearing and many more checks are fully automatized.

As far as we know, after extended web search, C.S.E. is today the most advanced software platform available dealing with steel connections checks, the only one allowing free placement of components and the successive check of generic joints, not based on cooking recipes.