The mission of the Institute is to develop, validate and verify reliable models alongside robust, accurate and efficient simulation tools to describe and understand complex non-linear systems, both natural and engineered, on a wide range of spatial and temporal scales, with an emphasis on advanced materials and structures.

In order to address this challenge, the vision of the world-class team of theoretical and computational mechanics researchers in the Institute is to, over the next 5 years:

- Develop novel approaches to model and simulate systems from the atomistic to the continuum level with a special emphasis on multiscale fracture, contact, friction and adhesion;

- Consolidate the development of advanced discretisation techniques to tackle non-equilibrium problems involving moving discontinuities, singularities and strong topological changes (extended and generalized finite elements, meshless/meshfree methods, lattice and molecular dynamics);

- Construct solution algorithms capable of handling very large non-linear (eigenvalue) problems with controlled computational cost;

- Focus on multi-phase, multi-scale and multi-field materials, in particular: (bio)composites, nano/micro-electronics materials;

- Propose real-time and interactive simulation tools for computational steering and surgical simulation through e.g. model order reduction algorithms;

- Study Nature to inspire the design of new materials and structures;

- Investigate novel approaches to achieve predefined accuracy levels for highly non-linear problems;

- Develop novel algorithms, sustainable and open-source software with professional developers to harness the soaring computing power available for massively parallel simulations to prepare for exascale computing (2017).