NAFEMS Americas and Digital Engineering (DE) teamed up (once again) to present CAASE, the (now Virtual) Conference on Advancing Analysis & Simulation in Engineering, on June 16-18, 2020!

CAASE20 brought together the leading visionaries, developers, and practitioners of CAE-related technologies in an open forum, unlike any other, to share experiences, discuss relevant trends, discover common themes, and explore future issues, including:
-What is the future for engineering analysis and simulation?
-Where will it lead us in the next decade?
-How can designers and engineers realize its full potential?
What are the business, technological, and human enablers that will take past successful developments to new levels in the next ten years?

Resource Abstract

The ASSESS Initiative has recently released a Strategic Insight paper entitled "Understanding a Generative Design Enabled Design Process Paradigm Shift."





The vision for Generative Design is to enable a significant paradigm shift in the current design processes via the creation of computer-generated designs as early as the concept stage by Design Engineers. These generated designs are based on proper specifications of the intended use case, design space, performance objectives, and design constraints that account for the desired performance and manufacturing/assembly/fabrication of the design. This approach overturns the current practice where designs must first be created so they can be evaluated against their performance requirements.



Generative Design techniques also have the potential of being a key enabler for Democratization of Engineering Simulation by providing simulation-driven design concepts that allow a user to define a design scenario as input to a Generative Design tool to explore the design space for feasible design options. Driving Generative Design up front to the “early stages” of the development process will change the nature of the work that is performed throughout the design process. The significant paradigm shift in the design process that could be enabled by Generative Design is the ability for Design Engineers to use automated design processes that are performance driven and manufacturing/assembly/fabrication “aware.”



Generative Design is a form of design space exploration that is generally underpinned by physics-based simulations. A typical problem may have the statement, “give me designs for my use case that meet my stiffness and stress requirements and with minimum weight.” Generative Design should be employed as early as possible, before the design space becomes overly constrained. However, this does not negate the vision that optimization and validation be applied repeatedly as the product design is developed.



There have been numerous attempts to define Generative Design where many of these are from suppliers of technology who define Generative Design in terms of the solutions that they offer. Through efforts of the ASSESS Generative Theme working group and multiple ASSESS Congress working sessions, the ASSESS Initiative has developed the following definition of Generative Design and highly recommends that end users, software vendors, industry analysts, and research organizations adopt this definition to enable a common understanding.



Generative design is the use of algorithmic methods to generate feasible designs or outcomes from a set of performance objectives, performance constraints, and design space for specified use cases.



Performance objectives and constraints may include factors from multiple areas including operational performance, weight/mass, manufacturing, assembly or construction, usability, aesthetics, ergonomics, and cost.



This workshop will explore the following topics:

1. What is Generative Design

2. The possibility of a Paradigm Shift

3. What Software Capabilities are Required for a Paradigm Shift

4. A Capabilities/Suitability assessment model

5. Organizational and Cultural Challenges Required to Enable a Paradigm Shift