Structural models of steel deck often cannot include all the details of the deck itself. In the past engineers have used equivalent orthotropic plate models to account for the differing stiffness parallel and perpendicular to steel deck corrugations as well as in shear. These models can be of great use but a recent paper from SDII researchers, to be presented at the International Specialty Conference on Cold-Formed Steel, hosted by the Center for Cold-Formed Steel Structures, shows that great care must be employed. PDF of Paper: Modeling Deck – Bian et al CCFSS2016.
Further work on this topic with an SDII technical report provides additional insight on shell finite element models for steel deck and the strength and weaknesses of currently available analytical expressions for predicting deck deformations. Get the report here: https://jscholarship.library.jhu.edu/handle/1774.2/40632.