FEDEAS stands for Finite Elements for Design, Evaluation and Analysis of Structures.

The name also pays tribute to  the famous builder of the Parthenon in Athens, FEIDIAS. It is, thus, a bridge between my origins and current challenges. Encyclopedia Britannica gives the following account of FEIDIAS contributions to classical Greece.

The program FEDEAS was born at UC Berkeley in the early nineties to address the need for sophisticated nonlinear structural elements for the seismic evaluation of buildings and bridges. Looking around for a lean and powerful platform to support this modeling effort, former graduate student Enrico Spacone and I concluded that there is no better program for the task than the program FEAP by Professor Robert L. Taylor of UC Berkeley. FEAP is characterized by modular architecture and by the facility of introducing any type of custom elements, input utilities and custom strategies and procedures. The definition of structural geometry and the handling of structural and element data is provided by FEAP which also contains powerful, global solution strategies for static and dynamic analysis.

Former graduate students Enrico Spacone, Fabio Taucer, David Sze, Mohd Yassin and Giorgio Monti  played an important role in the early development stages of the structures library. The recent contributions to the program by Ph.D. students Amir and Ashraf Ayoub are not yet ready for release, while a fresh batch of graduate students have started developing new elements. Ultimately, however, everything is extensively rewritten, revised, extended and tested by me, who, therefore, bears sole responsibility for the program's flaws and limitations. Needless to say, that the program is in constant evolution and the users' suggestions will play an important role in future improvements.