Computer Aided Iterative Design – A Future Trend in Computer Aided Engineering Software

Typical engineering design processes involve an initial design, followed by iterations of analyses, interpreting and evaluating analyses results, and proposing new design or modifying existing design. The final design often results from intuitions obtained during this iterative process. Most computer-aided engineering (CAE) software focuses on the computer-aided analysis by advancing capabilities in pre-processing, computation, and post-processing. However, little attention has been paid to the support of the aforementioned iterative design process, which is the common practice in engineering design. Authors believe the next-generation CAE software should evolve into CAID (Computer- Aided Iterative Design) software to help engineers go through the iterative design process and develop better engineering designs. In this paper, key software requirements for the iterative design process are discussed in this work. Furthermore, prototype CAID software developed using C++, Qt, and VTK is demonstrated. The analyzing capability of the developed CAID software is based on an essential software framework for meshfree methods (ESFM). The proposed CAID concept and prototype software shall provide guidelines for future CAE software development.