Future trends in computer aided optimal design

Structural optimization is now a mature discipline, and it begins to penetrate the industrial community. Several commercially available FEM systems will soon be released with design optimization capabilities. Therefore the most important area of development in the next few years will certainly reside in creating good user interfaces aimed at facilitating the task of the designers. In particular it will be extremely important to nicely integrated FEM and CAD technologies within an optimization loop, in order to fully computerize the design cycle.