This conference paper was submitted for presentation at the NAFEMS World Congress 2025, held in Salzburg, Austria from May 19–22, 2025.

Abstract

Traditional Computer Aided Engineering emphasizes the use of simulation as a preparatory activity before verifying and validating a product through hardware testing. The main benefit of simulation is to speed up product development in a 'œfirst time right' paradigm where a hardware driven product V&V phase is expected to confirm what is already known through computer simulation. In many industries, for example Railway and Automotive, this hardware driven product V&V phase constitues a major share of the overall product development effort, as safety requirements are very high and other phases of product development have been streamlined and optimized using simulation. In other industries, for example Aerospace and and Nuclear, cost-prohibitive and, in some cases, impractical hardware testing has led already led to a large share of well-established virtual product V&V procedures. More and more, the Automotive and Railway industries desire to establish strategies for Virtual Product V&V as well. The task is to define virtual V&V processes that provide at least the same level of assurance and certainty as the established hardware driven processes. For this, it is necessary to quantify the uncertainty of simulation results and compare it to the acceptable, but usually unknown, uncertainty of established hardware based V&V procedures. Perhaps quantifying the certainty or assurance of a V&V procedure would be more to the point, but we use the established term 'œUncertainty Quantification (UQ)'. We will present several application application examples that adhere to the following pattern: 1) Quantify the uncertainty of an established, hardware-based V&V process 2) Validate the simulation model 3) Quantify the uncertainty of the validated simulation model 4) Propose a virtual product V&V process with equivalent uncertainty It is important to note that, due to the need to validate the simulation models, hardware testing still plays an important role in product V&V. However, the use of simulation enables more efficient and flexible use of hardware testing, resulting in faster, more efficient product V&V. While we acknowledge that there is still a long way to go before simulation is fully leveraged in product V&V, we hope to provide some useful ideas and guidance to those who wish establish a strategy for Virtual Product V&V in their field.