“…Gorman (1981) introduced an auxiliary plate for which accurate solution is easily available to the original problem and the combined solution satisfies the governing differential equation, the boundary and support conditions. Since there is no exact solution in general, various numerical approaches, such as the finite difference method (Nishimura, 1953;Cox, 1955;Johns and Nataraja, 1972), the Rayleigh-Ritz method (Nowacki, 1953;Dowell, 1974;Narita, 1984;Laura and Cortinez, 1985), the Galerkin method (Yamada et al, 1985), the modal constraint method (Kerstens, 1979;Gorman, 1981), the finite element method (Mirza and Petyt, 1971;Rao et al, 1973;Rao et al, 1975;Utjes et al, 1984), the spline finite strip method (Fan and Cheung, 1984) and the flexibility function method (Bapat and Suryanarayan, 1989), are utilized for these problems. Recently, Liew et al (1994a) and Kitipornchai et al (1994) employed their pb-2 Ritz method to treat plates with point supports with success.…”