“…These are primarily used in cases when the physical consequences of long range dislocation interactions are investigated and when large simulation volumes, large ensembles for statistical averaging, longer timescales and/or higher numerical precision is required. Due to the simplification mentioned above a quantitative agreement with experiments cannot be expected, yet, these tools have been successfully applied to investigate, e.g., creep [15,16], dislocation avalanches [17,18,19] and patterning [20,21] of dislocations. An intermediate class is represented by 2.5D simulations, which are essentially 2D but with the inclusion of some 3D mechanisms, such as dislocation multiplication or dislocation pinning [22,23,24,25,26,27,28].…”