In civil engineering of shorelines, hard engineering is generally defined as controlled disruption of natural processes by using man-made structures.

Hardware-in-the-Loop (HIL) applications are used by design and test engineers to evaluate and validate vehicle components during development of new systems, assemblies and vehicles. Rather than testing these components in complete system setups, HIL allows the testing of new components and prototypes while communicating with software models that simulate the rest of the vehicle and system