In this paper, an adaptive approach, with remeshing as essential ingredient, towards robust and efficient simulation techniques for fast transient, highly non-linear processes including contact is discussed. The necessity for remeshing stems from two sources: the capability to deal with large deformations that might even require topological changes of the mesh and the desire for an error driven distribution of computational resources. The overall computational approach is sketched, the adaptive remeshing strategy is presented and the crucial aspect, the choice of suitable error indicator(s), is discussed in more detail. Several numerical examples demonstrate the performance of the approach.