My agency uses a lot of semi-integral abutments. in this type of abutment, the girders extend over the abutment wall and are locked together with a large end diaphragm block that also provides the pavement seat for the approach slab.

I have provided a plan sheet and screen shots of one I modeled as an example. I did this by placing a second deck below the main deck and using some of the solid modeling tools such as the cut feature and the "Difference Feature" tool. That workflow can be tedious and may cause the deck to lose it's intelligence by becoming a simple parametric solid. I also ran into a situation when using the difference feature tool where the deck and approach slab were treated in the explorer as a single "Approach Slab" element. so this is not the ideal workflow.

I would like to see added functionality to allow for modeling of this type of end diaphragm / abutment condition. 2 likely options to accomplish this might be as follows:

1. Allow deck end conditions to be added in the place deck tool that would allow the user to specify conditions such as diaphragm depth, length, width, pavement seat depth and height, or even how far below the bottom of the girders it extends.

   1. Might be a good idea to allow separate materials or item types to be associated for possible pay item purposes.

2. allow for an end diaphragm template that could be modeled in such a way. it would allow the user to specify a girder embedment, support line offset that would allow it to be modeled completely outside of a support line if need be, pavement seat depth and height, and either a length of the diaphragm or an offset from edge of deck.