North American Regional Summit 2008

Event Proceedings Now Available!

Event Proceedings Now Available!

The Issues

Where is engineering analysis and simulation going? Where should it be going, and how will we all help get it there? What are the business, technological, and human enablers that will carry the past successful developments, applications, and business impact of Computer Aided Engineering (CAE) to higher plateaus during the next decade and beyond?

The Event

NAFEMS, the premier global organization dedicated to the advancement and improvement of engineering simulation, hosted NAFEMS 2020 in Hampton, Virginia during October 29-31, 2008 which brought together the leading visionaries, developers, and practitioners of CAE-related technologies and business processes to share relevant trends and roadmaps, to explore common themes, and to address these issues in an open forum. The goal is to provide attendees with the best “food for thought and action” to deploy CAE over the next several years.

The Topics

A vision of CAE’s potential in 2020 has many facets associated with maximizing the value of using engineering analysis and simulation in addressing the ever-increasingly complexity of products and their life cycles. NAFEMS 2020 included keynote speakers, exhibits, and breakout sessions exploring the following subjects:

• Business developments to increase the financial impact of CAE investments
• • Development and deployment of CAE roadmaps
  • Management and executive awareness and understanding to make CAE deployment decisions with enduring positive impact
  • Integration of simulation information within Product Lifecycle Management (PLM)
  • Broadening the scope of industries and applications that benefit from advanced engineering analysis and simulation
  • The roles of CAE software and hardware developers

• Technical developments to improve speed, accuracy, reliability, accessibility, and applicability of results (“the purpose of computing is insight, not numbers .”) 
• • High-Performance Computing (HPC) systems for CAE (further synergies between hardware architectures and software algorithms)
  • Capturing the relevant physics well enough to gain engineering insight through multifunctional and multiphysics simulation
  • Material characterization including multiscale material models and data management; understanding and coping with model limitations, etc.
  • The impact of nanotechnologies on CAE requirements such as multifunctional “designer” nano-materials
  • Timely insight of mushrooming results: visualization, animation, and immersive virtual reality (“Moore’s Law doesn’t apply to the human brain ”)
  • Driving design improvement and optimization from smart simulations
  • Real-Time virtual simulations
  • Design uncertainty quantifications and non-deterministic optimization
  • Innovative approximation methods and evolutionary optimization

• Human issues
• • Intelligent engineering collaboration environments
  • Teaching simulation as part of the basic engineering curricula 
  • Evolving engineering processes and organizations to leverage CAE advances 
  • Certification of engineers to help ensure safe and effective use of CAE 
  • Training and education aligned with a 2020 vision