The development of the ICME supply-chain: Route to ICME implementation and sustainment

Over the past twenty years, integrated computational materials engineering (ICME) has emerged as a key engineering field with great promise. Models simulating materials-related phenomena have been developed and are being validated for industrial application. The integration of computational methods into material, process and component design has been a challenge, however, in part due to the complexities in the development of an ICME “supply-chain” that supports, sustains and delivers this emerging technology. ICME touches many disciplines, which results in a requirement for many types of computational-based technology organizations to be involved to provide tools that can be rapidly developed, validated, deployed and maintained for industrial applications. The need for, and the current state of an ICME supply-chain along with development and future requirements for the continued pace of introduction of ICME into industrial design practices will be reviewed within this article.