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

Abstract

In order to keep up with a rapidly evolving engineering landscape, CAE teams seek to improve the efficiency of their workflows and reduce the time to market. The integration of CAD and CAE is a longstanding challenge and a critical aspect of model build. At its core lies the need for a robust and effective bridge between design (PDM/PLM systems) and simulation (SDM systems/CAE tools) that will enable the definition of streamlined workflows for the extraction of CAD data and the seamless creation of CAE structures. More often than not, PDM systems and the CAE tools used for creation of the digital models are disconnected and CAE engineers need to possess substantial expertise in both domains in order to get access to the right data promptly and hassle-free. This, inevitably, limits the extent to which the extraction of the required CAD data can be standardized and automated. At the same time, the digital mock-up (DMU) is organized in sub-assemblies considering several factors, that balance both engineering and manufacturing considerations. However, in the majority of cases, the organization of the DMU is not well suited to CAE models and therefore, the classification of CAD parts into CAE modules plays a pivotal role in the CAE model build turnaround time. The differences in modularization between CAD models and CAE sub-assemblies necessitate a mapping process between the DMU structure and the CAE modules. This work presents an overview of a seamless framework for streamlined transition from CAD to CAE structures for optimized product development. It features a direct interface to the PDM for DMU downloads, offering an efficient gateway to CAD structures directly from within the SDM system. Template-driven methods are utilized for the automatic creation of CAE structures, which can be previewed in the embedded viewer and corrected if needed. In addition, CAE structures can be created manually by visually identifying sub-assemblies in the viewer. AI-driven CAE structure creation is also supported, leveraging previously created CAE structures. The framework ensures that only new CAD files related to the structure are downloaded from the PDM system, and it facilitates their translation to pre-processing-ready files either locally or on a remote server. Finally, it can directly check for part-level updates of CAE modules in the PDM system, enabling a quick estimation of upcoming workload for the next update, or even a shortcut for rapid model updates.