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

Abstract

Today, virtual product development is essential in vehicle projects in large automotive groups in order to keep costs down. As part of the CAE development process, the vehicle'™s behavior in operational mode must be investigated. It has become common practice to employ multibody dynamics simulations for this task, where the vehicle is treated as composed of various rigid or elastic bodies that can undergo translational or rotational displacement. Multibody dynamics simulation experts then first build up a virtual vehicle model and subsequently let it drive certain maneuvers on various kinds of standardized roads under different driving conditions that apply for all projects. Managing, sharing and collaborating on the related CAE data, CAE methods and CAE processes across a larger number of simulation engineers can, however, become a challenge. It is therefore important to establish means of working together in teams. For this it makes sense to organize simulation data in such a way that common CAE data files as well as certain process-scripts or simulation-methods in general, can be shared with the whole team. To this end, libraries of common CAE files - such as templates, technical components or connectors that define the vehicle, or the roads and driving conditions that are applied to the vehicle - and all types of process-scripts are created and maintained by a small number of experts. They can then be used by all CAE users working on the different car projects. To ensure that this also works regardless of the location of the CAE engineers, special tools are required to exchange data. For certain disciplines of the virtual product development process, e.g. handling crash simulations, simulation data management has successfully been introduced many years ago and has been in use ever since. Other simulation domains such as multibody dynamics simulations face different kinds of challenges. In this presentation, we want to demonstrate how to foster collaboration between multibody dynamics simulation experts using simulation data management tools. We will address the virtual product development process '“ from vehicle model building to running the simulations and the integration with the preprocessor '“ and work out concepts that improve effectiveness as well as consistency for those engaged in the workflow. In particular, we will focus on the challenges that we face when introducing a simulation data management system for multibody dynamics simulations: Since in a multibody dynamics simulation, naturally, the model is made up of many individual parts that are each stored in an individual file, the data structure to include in the simulation is extensive and rather complex. Plus, that model has to be combined with a certain road, driving condition and maneuver. An in-depth reproduction of that complex structure in the simulation data management system is key, though, to make full use of the system'™s advantages. However, complexity must not be traded for usability and maintainability such that integrating the preprocessor for easily managing the model is also an important aspect to take care of. In our presentation, with an example integration of a multibody dynamics simulation workflow, we will show how to achieve a detailed mapping with the simulation data management system. At the same time, we will demonstrate how we manage to foster interaction with the system among the simulation engineers and thus enhance collaboration.