Initiating a CAD renaissance: Multidisciplinary analysis driven design: Framework for a new generation of advanced computational design, engineering and manufacturing environments

•We evaluate CAD/CAE/CAM systems for support for engineering design and analysis.•We study the field’s history to understand how it lost sight of its original vision.•We conclude that a new era of CAD systems needs to be developed ab initio.

We present a critical analysis of the effectiveness of the current field of CAD, and discuss some of the forces that have taken it so far off course from its strikingly foresighted origins. Armed with the ensuing understanding of the operational forces that have taken CAD adrift, we conclude that the disparity between CAD’s mired state-of-the-art condition relative to more appropriate, inspired and achievable goals for CAD calls for more drastic measures. It is asserted that, well beyond the evolutionary progression of incremental steps characteristic of next version system releases, the field is overdue for developing a class of genuine design-centric, ab initio, CAD systems architectures effecting the original CAD vision through the powerful instruments of contemporary computing tools and technologies.