BENCHMARK January 2026

BENCHED

View From Your Editorial Team

We’re standing at a precipice. Not just in terms of mere engineering simulation – but societally, geopolitically, environmentally, and probably existentially. But those are way beyond anything we can, or should, discuss in an engineering magazine, so let’s leave those topics for the bar after one of this year’s NAFEMS regional conferences, nafems.org/nrc.

The precipice in engineering simulation, while not quite as profound, is fascinating. This issue of Benchmark is all about the future of engineering simulation – balancing probability, predicted results, push-button analysis, and simulation for all, with the one thing that is lacking in many areas at the moment – sense. Five years ago, in the January 2021 issue, we posed the question, “What’s next for simulation?”, and we got some fascinating replies from regular contributors, members of our community, and software vendors.

Back then, we were excited about the potential for an AI/ML breakthrough, focused on geometric deep learning and physics-informed machine learning, and were also making sure we moved toward “Explainable ML” for safety-critical applications. Of course, the pace at which AI (last time I use the phrase here, I promise!) has moved in the past five years has been staggering – “more of a rupture than a transition” – and we’re now way beyond using it for simple “pattern recognition” style tasks. It’s embedded not just on most engineering simulation platforms, but in many areas of our lives, for better or worse. While the societal discourse is about, amongst other things, jobs being taken and what all these changes mean for our collective future, at NAFEMS, we’re firmly focused on the fact that our industry needs guardrails, quality data, and ways to ensure credibility more than ever before. When the black box becomes more autonomous, the engineering world needs communities like NAFEMS to make sure the results actually make sense.

As predicted in 2021, over the past five years, industry has seen operational and cost savings from the use of Digital Twins, moving them beyond the R&D phase and positioning them at the heart of operational realities. Democratization, also at the heart of our 2021 predictions, has seen simulation get into the hands of more users without requiring them to be experts. Today, more and more software products are accessible and used by non-simulation experts, thanks to advances in AI (sorry).

As we’ll read in this issue, however, the concern now shifts from getting the tools into more people’s hands to ensuring they’re used correctly and that the results are credible and reliable, rather than full of hallucinations, non-deterministic errors, and other unexplainable phenomena.

At the time of writing our 2021 ‘What next?’ article, women made up around 12% of core engineering roles, and that figure had risen to 17% by 2024, with the trend continuing upwards. A slow-moving needle, but progress nonetheless. Where the industry has failed so far, however, is in raising the number of working engineers and analysts from a wider range of backgrounds and cultures. Our industry remains stubbornly stale, male and pale – intentional inclusion is still necessary to ensure we truly reflect our world, not just the people already in positions of power. An uncomfortable truth for many, but one we have a responsibility to not only acknowledge but recommit to doing something about, for everyone’s benefit. We’re all on this pale blue dot, and the engineering problems we need to solve are ours collectively.

So, in this issue of Benchmark, we’ve once again asked our community, “What’s next?” Given the shifts we’ve seen since we last asked the question, it will be intriguing to see where we’re at in 2031. I, for one, hope it’s a place where we’ve moved past the disruption phase, towards a credible, validated, and democratized simulation future we can all be part of, rely on, and enjoy.

David Quinn - Editor

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