Engineering design and the impact of digital technology from computer-aid engineering to industrial metaverses: A perspective

Digital technology for engineering design is evolving from computer-aided engineering tools via digital twins to industrial metaverses. These advances are resolving many of the challenges associated with implementing concurrent design and enabling larger design domains to be considered and designs to be developed, reviewed and demonstrated more rapidly and with a wider range of stakeholders. However, the new technology is also creating new challenges associated with confidence in digital representations and with methods of working with a rapidly evolving design. These challenges need to be addressed so that radical new designs of complex systems can be produced quickly to support society in addressing the evolving crisis of climate change.