2. The role of digital simulation in the design process

The rapid progress of digital simulation is driving major industrial challenges:

• The use of simulation is becoming increasingly common at industrial level, in order to guarantee rapid and reliable design, and to open up the field of innovation;

• digital simulation is making great strides, growing at the same pace as computer power: from terafolp in 2005 (10 ¹² operations per second) to exaflop (10 ¹⁸ ) in 2015;

• the implementation of increasingly complex models requires a specific understanding of each phenomenon being simulated (materials: multi-scale, systems: multiphysics);

• the lack of input data from experimentation becomes crucial to the relevance...