Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2026

DOI

10.1007/s00366-026-02379-1

Publication Title

Engineering with Computers

Volume

42

Issue

5

Pages

171 (28 pp.)

Abstract

Artificial intelligence is beginning to reduce the manual effort in the CAD-to-mesh pipeline. Written for meshing and geometry practitioners with limited AI background, this survey organizes recent work by workflow step. We cover part classification and segmentation, mesh quality prediction, and defeaturing. We review AI guidance for unstructured meshing, block-structured meshing in 2D and 3D, and volumetric parameterization, including reconstruction from implicit or sampled geometry. We also discuss parallel mesh generation and scripting automation via reinforcement learning and large language models. Across these topics, AI complements established geometry and meshing algorithms rather than replacing them. We conclude with practical lessons and open challenges in data, benchmarks, and trustworthy integration.

Rights

© The Authors 2026

This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original authors and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.

Data Availability

Article states: "No datasets were generated or analysed during the current study."

Original Publication Citation

Owen, S., Brown, N., Chrisochoides, N., Garimella, R., Gu, X. F., Ledoux, F., Lei, N., Quadros, R., Ray, N., Winovich, N., & Zhang, Y. J. (2026). A survey of AI methods for geometry preparation and mesh generation in engineering simulation. Engineering with Computers, 42(5), Article 171. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00366-026-02379-1

ORCID

0000-0003-3088-0187 (Chrisochoides)

Download

Share

COinS