These slides were presented at the NAFEMS World Congress 2025, held in Salzburg, Austria from May 19–22, 2025.

Abstract

Manufacturing companies face growing product complexity. They need higher levels of simulation in product development. Maintaining simulation results and product data synchronization is essential to shorten design cycles and increase throughput. For many companies, this is still a challenge. There are fragmented design processes across disconnected Product Lifecycle Management (PLM), Simulation Process and Data Management (SPDM) and Multidisciplinary Design Optimization (MDO) environments which run on different applications, leading to siloed datasets. The lack of interoperability between various CAD, CAE and process automation and design optimization authoring tools and data management systems often results in data duplication, loss of traceability and inconsistent user experience. This prevents valuable analysis and simulation information from being maintained and used throughout products'™ lifecycle. A loss of knowledge and experience in simulation-driven design, amplified by a globally distributed workforce, creates an additional layer of difficulty. This necessitates capturing and transferring knowledge through democratization and automation of engineering workflows. Every stakeholder, from CAD designers to CAE analysts, should participate in the simulation process and seamlessly execute simulation workflows to find trusted designs early in the product development. In this paper, we present a state-of-the-art federated approach to managing and automating design, simulation and optimization processes through the digital thread, while preserving the relationships between teams, their processes, tools, and data that contribute to improving product performance. This happens by connecting multiple PLM and SPDM systems with an open digital engineering platform. What if this platform can act as a key enabler to orchestrate and automate diverse CAD/CAE authoritative sources of data and models into a ready-to-use simulation workflow to collaboratively perform system-level MDO? We demonstrate this innovative approach by taking the simulation-driven design process of a crankshaft, one of the most important parts of an engine'™s power transmission system, as a reference. Cross-functional engineering teams such as CAD designers, CAE analysts for structural and modal analysis, as well as simulation experts and other stakeholders can all benefit from an agnostic web-based framework to convey and automate various CAD/CAE models (stored in different PLM, SPDM and other data management systems) into a single executable simulation workflow. This allows them to seamlessly conduct further design optimization analyses with the goal of finding the best compromise between the crankshaft weight and deformation caused by the load and its maximum stress.