NAFEMS Americas and Digital Engineering (DE) teamed up (once again) to present CAASE, the (now Virtual) Conference on Advancing Analysis & Simulation in Engineering, on June 16-18, 2020!

CAASE20 brought together the leading visionaries, developers, and practitioners of CAE-related technologies in an open forum, unlike any other, to share experiences, discuss relevant trends, discover common themes, and explore future issues, including:
-What is the future for engineering analysis and simulation?
-Where will it lead us in the next decade?
-How can designers and engineers realize its full potential?
What are the business, technological, and human enablers that will take past successful developments to new levels in the next ten years?

Resource Abstract

Advanced manufacturers realize that a pervasive culture of systems thinking is required for their silo’ed engineers to successfully manage multidisciplinary products of increasing complexity, while also considering conflicting business, competitive, and operating environments – the traditional reductionist design approach is no longer adequate by itself. While systems thinking is pervasive in the space satellite and electronics market segments, other segments are considering it or investigating how to implement it in their organization and processes. Furthermore, intelligent simulation automation and effective, pervasive SPDM are essential enablers, as manually performed simulation, with its experts and data trapped in silos, becomes infeasible.

We present an alternate enterprise data architecture, including the key characteristics of a digital thread spanning the product lifecycle – from requirements and conceptual design through maintenance and end-of-life, including pervasive and accessible simulation across the enterprise. It is limiting to discuss SPDM outside the context of an enterprise digital thread, one that captures “content” generated during the lifecycle (e.g., CAD models, systems models, and simulation data), and also, through meaningful relationships and metadata, links the content in a configuration-managed and versioned graph to capture “intent”. Capturing intent provides answers to queries such as why the product was designed a certain way, what the accuracy of the simulation data is, why the product was architected a certain way and the related benefits, and how IoT data was used to predict maintenance and improve designs. This elevates data to useful and actionable corporate knowledge that, when broadly accessible, becomes the fuel that drives innovation. When implemented correctly, it is the full digital record of the critical IP/DNA of an organization, across all its products, over time. This rich trove of organized data is valuable, as the readily available engineering knowledge can be leveraged in future projects and can be utilized by machine learning to more effectively and accurately train AI algorithms.

The increasing product complexity would require earlier and wider use of simulation to support the product development with systems centric thinking. On the other hand, for decades, simulation experts, tools and data have lurked within organizational silos. While simulation’s ability to model multiple domains and predict overall system behaviour has steadily increased, the isolated and proprietary nature of the tools and processes has limited its impact. Hence, while the potential of simulation is well-recognized, product teams have maintained strong dependency on physical testing as a reliable though expensive and time-consuming way to explore alternatives and validate designs. Moreover, with physical testing, only a very small number of designs can be evaluated, with the risk of late detection of problems.

This is no longer feasible for managing today’s multidisciplinary products. These products require large teams that are segregated geographically and by organizational silos. The authors present an approach to SPDM as a Service within PLM, one that overcomes many of the issues created by proprietary applications solely used by the experts and enables the proliferation of Systems Thinking across the enterprise.

Using a real-world example, we demonstrate some of the needed steps to realise simulation as a pervasive service within an open, extensible PLM platform, going from requirements and systems modelling through systems analysis and mixed-fidelity simulations and system V&V. This will show the digital thread that connects these data with the system architecture at the core, including pervasive requirements and pervasive simulation, enabling systems thinking.

This reference implementation of effective SPDM within a System Lifecycle Management platform will be made available on request for review and further development to relevant parties. We encourage further collaborative work at a pre-competitive level, within a community of like-minded end-users, to accelerate the development and the adoption of these technologies, expanding from a product-centric PLM platform to a System Lifecycle Management approach and platform.