Today, Computational Engineering (CE) is an established field of research that develops and advances the modelling, simulation and optimisation (MSO) of engineering problems. Although CE has brought remarkable improvements to engineering (e.g., optimised designs, shorter time-to-market, lower production costs, contributions to comprehensive simulation platforms), MSO is still considered as selective add-ons to traditional design processes, rather than as a driving force. This situation is becoming particularly pressing, as practitioners, besides asking for faster and more accurate simulation tools, are now also asking for a more consistent MSO strategy. The ad-hoc nature of MSO in today’s design processes leads to continuous model decay as the prototype evolves while the model does not. Predictions based on outdated models lead to severe inaccuracies, whereas model recovery in retrospect entails high costs. This unsatisfactory situation is already stifling progress in many industries, keeping product development costs and times higher than necessary and limiting the ability of manufacturers to quickly create new variants of existing products.

This challenge is attributed to the lack of approaches for properly representing computational models (CMs) and their accompanying simulation techniques in a sufficiently holistic manner. CMs are constructed ad hoc and only serve as input for a particular simulation task of a specific part of the system at a particular design stage, not as an equivalent representative (with a particular set of properties) of the whole design and as such accompanying the entire design process from beginning to end. CE is lacking an integrative, reflective perspective on a meta-level. Appropriate and comprehensive definitions of CM semantics, relationships between CMs, and operations on CMs are often missing, particularly in the context of complex mathematical models, such as those based on partial differential equations (PDEs). Such descriptive concepts and tools are, however, of paramount importance for ensuring a consistent construction, adaptation and (re-)use of CMs throughout the design process.

The workshop „Towards Holistic Computational Engineering“ explores promising directions for future research in CE addressing the above raised issues. Research topics such as, e.g., multi-paradigm modelling, formal verification of CMs, CMs for simulations at multiple scales/physics and appropriate embedding of MSO in engineering design will be addressed. During the workshop, 9 keynote speakers will present their work and their ideas. Sufficient time is foreseen for questions and discussion.