The Special Session "Supporting simulations with strain measurement (CEN WS71)" comprised a presentation on Round Robin results for the CEN Workshop Agreement Validation of computational solid mechanics models  (CWA16799:2014) and four technical presentations on progress made in several fields relevant to validation. During the concluding, well-attended Panel Discussion led by Eann Patterson (University of Liverpool, UK) the panelists Erwin Hack (Empa, Switzerland), Marek Lomnitz (Dantec Dynamics GmbH) and Liam Jones (Airbus Operations UK) discussed this progress and sought feed-back from the audience .

The usefulness of the validation metric was unanimously acknowledged. The impressive progress of comparing data from irregular domains was found useful. Whereas the calibration procedure presented was found to be too restrictive, being applicable to DIC and relatively small objects only. It was further agreed that data management will become an increasingly important issue to exploit historical data, but that the development of a generally accepted standard data format was outside this Workshop and should be left to appropriate standardization bodies.

In addition the options to transfer the CEN Workshop Agreement into a new CEN Deliverable were presented, and a consensus was reached to go for a CEN Technical Report (CEN TR).