Innovation in product design and manufacturing has become a major driver for industrial competitiveness and profitability in recent years. As enabling technologies become more easily accessible, engineers are faced with increasing demands for designing and producing more complex mechanical devices to serve the needs of the society. Next generation engineering products will be ‘smart’ with many functionalities; they will be made of new materials; they will increase energy efficiency and reduce environmental impact; they will vary in size from nano to mega scales; and they will be more closely integrated with information processing systems. Also as mechanical systems are becoming increasingly complex to analyse and expensive to experiment, more emphasis will have to be placed on computer aided analysis, design, verification and manufacturing.