Abstract

In today?s product development processes, engineering analysts are valued for their skills with engineering simulation. They are also in high demand and hard to develop with education and training. Years of experience are needed to reach their level of expertise. Increasingly, these engineers are being asked to leverage their knowledge by developing methods and solutions for others to use in solving repetitive, yet often complex, engineering problems. Engineering software companies can help by providing simulation platforms that allow engineers to develop methods and solutions that can solve arbitrary problems so they can accomplish these goals. A method is an integrated, simplified workflow, data model, UI and set user objects that allows someone to accomplish a task or achieve a goal. The underlying set of engineering applications that enable the solution may externalize 100s of concepts/objects, menus, data objects, navigations, and more. The method filters and maps objects into a problem focused set of objects, tasks and steps, which under the covers uses the products? APIs and capabilities. A set of related methods makes up a solution, focused on solving an engineering problem or closely related applications. By developing and employing methods, engineering teams can unlock incredible increases in productivity, with one team reducing engineering design time to 2 hours from 4 week while also enabling 10x more design engineers to use simulation for a key multiphysics design problem, an 800% increase in productivity. A simulation platform must make the development of methods and sets of methods accessible to these engineers and others. The architecture must enable these methods to be run where they are needed, whether that is on-premise or via cloud and integrated into the engineer?s systems and environment. Standard APIs, crafted to make it easier to access and integrate with other services, are essential to method development success.