Section: Overall Objectives

Introduction

Numerical simulation has become a widespread tool in engineering. This fact is particularly noteworthy in the field of solid and structural mechanics which has given birth to finite element methods. In industrial design processes, experimenting and simulation go hand in hand, but the balance is increasingly shifted towards simulation, resulting into reduced costs and time to market.

In this general context, the objectives of the Macs project are to address new challenges arising from:

• the need to develop numerical procedures which are reliable and well-adapted to industrial applications;

• the emergence of active mechanics (e.g. control and optimisation) enabling the design of thinner and lighter (hence cheaper) structures, for which innovative modeling and discretization approaches are required.

These research directions benefit from a strong scientific environment and background at INRIA in the fields of numerical analysis and scientific computing (with a well-established record in structural mechanics), as well as in automatic control.

We also emphasize that – in the past five years – we have increasingly investigated specific topics pertaining to biomechanical modeling.