Industry is currently experiencing a drastic change in system design methodology. While products are becoming smarter, complex control systems and higher safety requirements are bing demanded, making virtual design ever more challenging. Consequently, as the underlying enabling technology, computer simulation is growing rapidly both in fidelity and computing intensity. However, the way engineers conduct multi-physics co-simulation today barely keeps up with the newest challenges, primarily due to four issues.

Consequently, as the underlying enabling technology, computer simulation is growing
rapidly both in fidelity and computing intensity. However, the way engineers conduct
multi-physics co-simulation today barely keeps up with the newest challenges, primarily
due to four issues.

The first issue is the lack of a collaborative virtual design platform across the supply
chain. Without such a tool, most suppliers can only validate their own components as
opposed to the entire system. Compatibility issues are often not discovered until the
system integration phase, resulting in substantial costs in design change and even
delayed product release.

The second issue is that the PC-based development environment simply cannot provide
the computing power demanded by todays high-fidelity co-simulations. A powerful and
scalable computing platform is needed.

The third issue is the extensive and error-prone manual efforts in managing large-scale
co-simulation, including managing multiple versions of subsystem model files
exchanged in different ways, examination of all model files in respective simulators,
invoking all simulators in desired manners, and more. As the co-simulation scales up,
these manual efforts can grow quickly like a rolling snowball.

The last issue is inefficient simulator license management. Since it is financially
unpractical to own unlimited licenses, engineers often have to share a pool of licenses,
manually track the availability of each one and manually launch simulations one after
another. This becomes incredibly challenging as co-simulation scales both in size and
variety of tools.

This article presents a cloud-based multi-physics co-simulation platform called
SimXpand that has been developed for use within Hitachi and by their suppliers.