This presentation was made at the 2019 NAFEMS World Congress in Quebec Canada

Resource Abstract

The modern environment of multinational work groups that need to collaborate on a daily basis imposes a series of obstacles that hinder the communication productivity. Ruling out the all-important factor of time zones, team members of varying levels of office distance but also of specialization need to have an efficient medium through which they can communicate, for example, analysis results and discuss problem solutions and counter measures, laying their goals and strategies.



Modern technologies have allowed even intercontinental teams to overcome the problem of office distance, bringing them into direct contact through voice or video conferencing. On the other hand though, the ever increasing amount of data that needs to be evaluated during meetings by team members of varying expertise level imposes a challenge to the teams’ collaborative environment and technologies to be used.



Taking as an example the field of Computer Aided Engineering (CAE) simulations for automotive applications, the ever stricter safety and emission regulations have dramatically increased the number of simulation models and resulting data that needs to be prepared, evaluated and revised. The current industry standard form for these to be carried out in a teamwork environment is the creation of reports that need to be authored manually and using software dedicated to accessing the simulation models. The reports then need to be distributed to team members for studying and discussion during their scheduled meetings. This has been proven to be labour-intensive, prone to errors and, as a result, time consuming and inefficient.



New, state of the art technologies mean that team members can now be directly engaged with the data to be discussed - in the above example, concerning CAE simulation models. These models can be experienced in a Virtual Reality (VR) room where participants from distanced locations can experience the data in real time and physical size being virtually there with their associates. On the other hand, model data like CAE results’ post-processing diagnostics can be extracted automatically and presented in a modern, user friendly and customizable web interface with interactive chart representation and direct access to CAE model viewer. These technologies allow even non-experts to extract meaningful information quickly and contribute to revisions, improvements and decision making.