Overview of the Guide for Verification and Validation in Computational Solid Mechanics

Perhaps the most common misconception about the Guide is that it would provide a definitive step-by-step V&V procedure, immediately applicable by analysts in computational mechanics. This expectation is quite understandable when viewed by an outsider to the V&V community. One reads a title page with words ASME standards committee and verification & validation, and expects a typical ASME standards document. Somehow the reader glosses over the very intentional first word of the title, i.e. Guide - something that offers underlying information. Not only the first time reader, but much of the informed V&V computational mechanics community desires a step-by-step standard.

However, it is the view of the committee that such a standard is many years in the future. The next immediate goal for PTC 60, and its AIAA Computational Fluid Dynamics Standards sister committee, is to attempt to define some best practices, which in the future can lead to standards; our ASME sister committee, PTC 61/V&V 20, is already addressing best practices for uncertainty analysis related to some aspects of V&V. The committee makes no excuses for writing the present Guide the way it did. After five years of discussion and debate, the committee recognizes it was a necessary, but difficult, first step. Much of V&V is not a ‘hard’ science, which is the bread-and-butter of most of computational mechanics, but more a ‘soft’ science like the philosophy of science, where differing points of view have merit, and need not be evaluated as either right or wrong.