For engineers who have to compare many possible design variations, I'm curious how you actually handle it in industry.

For example, if you have hundreds or thousands of possible geometry/parameter combinations:

• How do you decide which designs are worth simulating?
• Do you actually run simulations for all of them, or use some kind of screening/optimization method?
• What tools do you use for this?
• What part of the process takes the most time?
• Is computational cost the main limitation, or is setting up/running/post-processing the simulations the bigger bottleneck?
• Do you use surrogate models, reduced-order models, optimization software, custom Python scripts, etc.?
• What happens when the design space becomes too large to explore practically?

I'm particularly interested in how this is handled in industry and what the biggest bottleneck is in practice.