The GSA sustainability impact contours can fill a (crucial) gap on a project between initial sizing & production of BIM models when we can then easily use more comprehensive tools such as Arup Carbon, however they are currently out-of-date. Article below sets out Arup Structure's overall strategy on embodied carbon tools.
https://www.ribaj.com/products/technology-tools-to-help-cut-embodied-carbon-conor-hayes-arup

The idea that our Oasys products do (or more accurately did) ‘display environmental impacts, such as embodied carbon, in a similar manner to traditional structural parameters such as axial stress or deflections’ is a really powerful narrative of how embodied carbon can be part of the natural design flow of structural engineers.

The Arup Carbon Tool team are developing a live, centralised database of embodied carbon impact values - which will be steadily updated based on EPDs and the development of regionally-accurate figures; Veracity Database or Vdb. The proposal here is that GSA's values should reference the Veracity db and thus will be kept continually up to date.

At the moment there appears to be a largely scattered approach, with feedback, requests, surveys, and "large project" requirements driving the development of features and functionality. The result of this is a scattered feature set and poor integration with the common structural design workflows that we use on daily basis. We are all filling in the gaps with workarounds, spreadsheets, scripts, and use of other software. As a firm we need to have a clear vision for our structural software suite.

According to the GSA change log, the last major release (v8.0) was back in 2002 (http://oasys.intranet.arup.com/gsa/GsaChangeLog_8.htm) - i.e. 13 years ago. In software terms this is an eternity. This is likely a symptom of the lack of available resources (budget, staff, etc.) that the software development team has to work with, and needs to be addressed along with the question of development priorities.

This is a call for the establishment of a strong vision for our entire structural software suite. The aim should be for our software to be the intellectual data store for all the work-product "technology" we develop on our projects, in our spreadsheets, scripts, and other processes. The goal should be to minimise repeated tasks, eliminate duplicate work, increase sharing and continually learn from our combined ongoing experience.

This must be done through OUR software with a clear vision to guide the development objectives and the allocation of resources.

Would it be possible to have GSA envelope a combination following a convex hull approach rather than get just max / minimum effects. The user would select any two of the load effects (most likely fx and myy or fz and mx) and the results would be the points which define the perimeter of all the permutations in the envelope.
Each result point would have the other coexisting effects also output to assist with calculation.
The results would simplify ADSEC NM checks and also cover the cases where the worst case is not a maximum or minimum of one effect but a combination of two effects.

Smarten up the current GSA Wave Loading tool, include Stokes, Stream function and irregular linear waves
Element checking to offshore codes (API and AISC) - if this could be extended to easily checking plates (made up of a number of shell elements) to offshore codes (API 2V and DNV RPC202), this would be a very useful feature
Frequency domain calcs for fatigue, including fatigue life calc of joints
Non-linear analysis (if this is easy to use, this could be a good selling point. USFOS does this, but is about the only "simple to use" tool for push over analysis)
Inclusion of environmental loading from "non-morrison" load types. This would include diffraction loading and the like, which gets a bit out of my area of knowledge.

analsyis