We encountered a revolution in the early 1980s in engineering
design, with rudimentary 2D drafting systems and manual
intensive analysis packages. They offered increased productivity
as well as the ability to reach the physical prototypic and
testing stage with much greater certainty in the product’s
performance. More recently, the computer-based design tools
available to engineers have steadily increased in both range and
sophistication, resulting in the fully integrated 3D modelling
and multi-physics analysis tools available today. They have also
decreased substantially in cost which, together with the growth
in computing power and advances in computing infrastructures,
means that today’s engineer can develop concept designs, create
fully detailed 3D models and perform a wide range of analyses
and simulations on the desktop. The advances that have made this
level of accessibility to engineering tools possible are
primarily in the areas of system integration, ease of use and
processing power. The exchange of