JuliaCon 2026

There has been a rapid spread of AI agents into all aspects of society. The exponential increase in capabilities of these agents has led to new ways of working across nearly every profession. While the adoption of LLMs and agentic workflows has been more common in computer science and software development, the integration of these technologies into engineering system simulation tools is at its infancy. As an engineer with over 25 years of experience in model-based systems engineering across different engineering domains, I have had no previous experience with agentic workflows in my daily work prior to the last few months. Speaking with engineering simulation colleagues in different fields, many of them are in the same situation given that their traditional tools did not offer these capabilities but are now ready and interested to explore possibilities of these emerging technologies.

This talk will offer practical perspectives on agentic workflows focused on engineering system simulation use cases. Using the Dyad AI agent, these use cases will be explored using Dyad, Julia, and ModelingToolkit. The focus of this talk is to provide practical perspectives on agentic workflows in model creation, system model assembly, debugging, testing, and simulation and analysis. The examples will also explore different methods for providing resources to the agent to support the tasks required. Examples in different engineering domains will be presented. Various workflows are critically evaluated to assess effectiveness and accuracy. The focus of this talk is to provide practical perspectives demonstrating use cases that work well, those that are still developing or not yet mature (though certainly might be in future versions of the underlying LLMs), and effective prompting techniques based on personal experience. This talk will be presented via slides documenting the workflows along with live demonstrations within the time constraints of the talk.

The capabilities of engineering simulation tools are rapidly changing and are fundamentally redefining the human and machine interface. Engineers need to quickly adapt to utilize new technologies effectively and responsibly. Though it is certainly impossible to gain a deep understanding of agentic workflows within the duration of a single talk, the hope is that this talk demystifies the use of agentic workflows in system simulation within the Julia ecosystem, inspires critical thinking within the context of an engineer’s unique workflows and simulation needs, and provides practical perspectives that can lead to more effective usage as engineers start to adopt these new technologies.