The need for automation in the world-wide manufacturing industry has increased strongly in recent years. Through almost all industries, companies are trying to improve internal processes in order to save time and costs to remain competitive. In particular, the production of safety-relevant products are increasingly using computer assisted techniques, known as computer-aided engineering (CAE), before they going to production. Not only the design, but also physical properties are simulated and improved upfront. But even by using these mathematically complex computer simulations, it still takes a lot of manual work for the engineers to prepare and preprocess those CAE simulation to get reliable results.

The EXIST project QuadCover, consisting of mathematicians and computer scientists Dr. Matthias Nieser, Thomas Jablonski and Friedemann Pochert, is a spin-off of the Mathematical Geometry Processing Department of the faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science at the Freie Universität Berlin and is supported by the Mentor Professor Dr. Konrad Polthier. The scientific fundamentals of the project were researched in the working group and are improved in the spin-off and going to be adapted for the individual and practical applications. These highly complex mathematical methods should minimize both the time required for preprocessing and the quality of CAE simulations. The goal of this automated approach is to achieve a mathematically theoretical optimum, which cannot be determined with manual work.
Due to the theoretical generality, the algorithms are not only limited to the CAE environment but can be adapted to any application for 2D and 3D surface restructuring. An optimization of free-form facades of modern and architecturally sophisticated buildings is just as much a case of application as the simplification and optimization of objects for design as well as animations in the fields of film and computer graphics.