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

Abstract

Thanks to the increasing use of simulation in product development and product performance optimization, design engineers are producing large amounts of valuable simulation data that they wish to leverage and exploit efficiently for any future work. This will allow engineers to build on knowledge acquired through prior product development programs to better address new design challenges and achieve the performance targets of new product generations. Moreover, an efficient and reliable reuse of prior simulation data and simulation results also allows for more agile organizations where engineering resource allocations need to be flexibly adapted to and aligned with the rapidly changing market landscape and customer requirements. The cost and delay of re-training and re-skilling of personnel could be greatly reduced by providing efficient access to the available knowledge acquired through all prior simulation activities. In conclusion, our customers are becoming increasingly aware that they have a potential gold mine of historical data, and want reliable and performant means to exploit these data. In this paper, we present our work on how to improve and enrich simulation data management solutions so that novice engineers can maximally benefit from knowledge acquired in prior product generations. The basis for that knowledge is embedded in the wealth of simulation data that have been stored in the data management system. In one approach we demonstrate how prior simulation results can help analysts to speed up troubleshooting and improve quality of their simulation results by automatic retrieval of and comparison with similar simulation results from prior projects. To realize this, dedicated methods extract and capture knowledge from existing simulation result data and use a similarity analysis algorithm to identify which legacy data are suitable as a reference for a new analysis. In a second step, this supporting mechanism is extended with intuitive search capabilities, so that the user can intuitively interact with the system and fine tune the specific design issue for which prior knowledge needs to be gathered. In this stage, additional information is used that complement the information extracted from simulations, in order to improve the provided feedback.