During the process of optimisation and design search, the modelling nad analysis of engineering problems are exploited to yield improved designs. The engineer explores various design parameters that he wishes to optimise and a measure of the quality of a particular design (the objective function) is computed using an appropriate model. A number of algorithms may be used to yield more information about the behaviour of a model, and to minimise/maximise the objective function, and hence improve the quality of the design. This process may include lengthy and repetitive calculations to obtain the value of the objective function with respect to the design variables.