A comprehensive comparison of neural operators for 3D industry-scale engineering designs

Abstract

Neural operators have emerged as powerful tools for learning nonlinear mappings between function spaces, enabling real-time prediction of complex dynamics in diverse scientific and engineering applications. With their growing adoption in engineering design evaluation, a wide range of neural operator architectures have been proposed for various problem settings. However, model selection remains challenging due to the absence of fair and comprehensive comparisons. To address this, we propose and standardize six representative 3D industry-scale engineering design datasets spanning thermal analysis, linear elasticity, elasto-plasticity, time-dependent plastic problems, and computational fluid dynamics. All datasets include fully preprocessed inputs and outputs for model training, making them directly usable across diverse neural operator architectures. Using these datasets, we conduct a systematic comparison of four types of neural operator variants, including Branch-Trunk-based Neural Operators inspired by DeepONet, Graph-based Neural Operators inspired by Graph Neural Networks, Grid-based Neural Operators inspired by Fourier Neural Operators, and Point-based Neural Operators inspired by PointNet. We further introduce practical enhancements to adapt these models to different engineering settings, improving the fairness of the comparison. Our benchmarking study evaluates each model strengths and limitations in terms of predictive performance, computational efficiency, memory usage, and deployment complexity. The findings provide actionable insights to guide future neural operator development.