Loughborough University is a top-ten rated university in England for research intensity (REF2014) and an outstanding 66% of the work of Loughborough’s academic staff who were eligible to be submitted to the REF was judged as ‘world-leading’ or ‘internationally excellent’, compared to a national average figure of 43%. In choosing Loughborough for your research, you’ll work alongside academics who are leaders in their field. You will benefit from comprehensive support and guidance from our Doctoral College, including tailored careers advice, to help you succeed in your research and future career. Engineering complex systems such as aircraft, automobiles, trains etc., rely on extensive modelling and simulation before they are realised as products and enter service. Supporting this process is the need for a range of increasing fidelity mock-ups or prototypes to test where possible every aspect of the system from user interaction through to performance evaluation. However, the closer design faults are discovered nearer the finished product the more expensive it is to correct the fault or make subtle design changes that have expensive knock on costs. This studentship will focus on enabling research that will look at bringing the validation (known as virtual validation) closer to the early design stages rather than at the manufacturing stage. This brings important research challenges of how to reliably perform virtual validation on a computer model/simulation of the product long before it is built. This is a new aspect to co-simulation where elements of a complex product can be simulated simultaneously (possibly at different geographic locations) to create, for example, a whole vehicle simulation. New techniques involving virtual reality with model based engineering will be used to provide a comprehensive virtual validation environment. This is anticipated to be the next breakthrough in engineering since it will involve a paradigm shift in current working practices.