An interesting LinkedIn post was shared by Henry Bucklow at one of our industrial partners, “International TechneGroup Inc.” about RIED. The full article , “Re-imagining engineering design starts with re-imagining geometry” can be found below.
What happens when you combine nature-inspired design, artificial evolution, and an industrial-grade flexible geometry engine?
The Re-Imagining Engineering Design (RIED) research programme is funded by a 5-year UKRI EPSRC Programme Grant, exploring a future where, inspired by natural systems, design concepts are autonomously grown in response to external stimuli. RIED has already developed what the team has termed “cyber seeds” which contain all the information needed to generate a single design solution, directly analogous to a seed in nature that can grow into a single plant.
This radical approach allows super-fast generation of solutions, and permits the use of artificial evolutionary methods to adapt seeds to new scenarios. Alongside this, the RIED team is focused on real-world applicability of their results, ensuring their design concepts are ready for detailed design and manufacture.
This is where #CADfix comes into its own: the flexible geometry engine at the heart of CADfix, and its plethora of tools for geometry and topology manipulation, provide the capability to the RIED design engine to create coherent, watertight models. RIED exploits CADfix’s tolerant geometry to explore solution spaces with the confidence that the underlying model remains stable, and that queries behave reliably, robustly, and consistently. The model cleanup tools in CADfix ensure that the output from RIED is coherent and watertight, and can be exported to any downstream system as required.
Furthermore, the RIED team is exploring the use of CADfix diagnostics as design feedback, letting geometry quality actively guide how concepts evolve, defining a powerful shift from “design first, fix later” to “design with manufacturability built-in.”
As Professor Mark Price, lead investigator of the RIED programme, states: “It is the ability of CADfix to provide quality information on the model to inform design choices and support model creation for downstream use in any package that makes it a powerful part of the RIED approach to engineering design.”
If your organization is working with:
• Generative design
• AI-driven engineering
• Digital twins
• Advanced manufacturing
• Multi-CAD environments
…then a flexible geometry engine is no longer optional, it’s foundational, and CADfix is proving that the future of engineering design depends on it.
RIED runs until October 2026. For further information, contact Professor Mark Price at Queen’s University Belfast (m.price@qub.ac.uk) or Henry Bucklow at International TechneGroup Inc. (henry.bucklow@iti-global.com).
#EngineeringDesign #CADfix #GenerativeDesign #AIinEngineering #DigitalThread #Manufacturing #Geometry #PLM #Simulation #AdditiveManufacturing #DigitalEngineering“.
You can access the post via this link: https://www.linkedin.com/company/international-technegroup-inc-/posts/?feedView=all