Intelligent design search tools will become a vital component of all engineering design systems and will steer the user through the process of setting up, executing and post-processing design search and optimisation activities. Such systems require large-scale distributed simulations to be coupled with tools to describe and modify designs, using information from databases and knowledge bases. These tools are physically distributed and under the control of multiple elements in the supply chain. Whilst evaluation of a single design may require the analysis of gigabytes of data, to improve the process of design can require assimilation of terabytes of distributed data.

The technologies from Geodise have been commercialised in dezineforce (www.dezineforce.com) which is offering a web-enabled design search and optimisation service with third party packages such as those from ANSYS and Fluent. Intelligent optimization tools guide the user through the process of setting up calculations as a workflow over the web which run on remote secure, reliable hosted servers providing high performance and high throughput computing and database facilities.