This presentation was made at the NAFEMS Americas "Creating the Next Generation Vehicle" held on the 14th of November in Troy.

The automotive engineering community is now confronting the largest technology transformation since its inception. This includes the electrification of powertrains for more efficient consumption and cleaner emissions, the reinvention of the battery with fast wireless charging capabilities and finally the advent of a fully autonomous vehicle. Compounding to these technology changes, the automotive companies design verification process is moving away from a major reliance on physical testing to almost a full virtual simulation product verification process.

The automotive engineering community is now confronting the largest technology transformation since its inception. This includes the electrification of powertrains for more efficient consumption and cleaner emissions, the reinvention of the battery with fast wireless charging capabilities and finally the advent of a fully autonomous vehicle. Compounding to these technology changes, the automotive companies design verification process is moving away from a major reliance on physical testing to almost a full virtual simulation product verification process.

Resource Abstract

It is 2019, and despite decades of software development and application within the automotive industry, simulation continues to mostly exist within organizational silos limited to small number of experts, is highly manual and at times slow to support the faster vehicle development time.



As complexity increases, the engineering challenges in modeling simulation compound and require a system level thinking approach. Automotive manufacturers are beginning to realize that a pervasive culture of systems thinking is required for their siloed engineers to successfully manage the multidisciplinary nature of many of today’s products, while also considering the complex, interacting business and operating environments in which they exist. While this has been common practice in the space satellite arena, automotive companies have only just begun to consider systems approaches. Furthermore, as product complexity and connectivity increase exponentially, intelligent simulation automation is even more essential.



The primary emphasis of simulation point tools is to accurately simulate complex phenomena, requiring multidisciplinary and multi-physics simulation automation and enterprise systems engineering data management.



A requirements-driven, systems-centric unified data model within an open, vendor-neutral, enterprise platform is a foundational building block. Such an approach supports multidisciplinary, multi-fidelity systems modelling and automation, extending the power of simulation to the broader product team which can be empowered to perform exponentially more simulations and depend less in physical testing.



Data modeling approach must be complemented by more effective enterprise-wide Simulation Process and Data Management (SPDM), foundational to achieving closed-loop traceability with requirements, test results, design data and product field data. This is an essential element of the digital thread architecture required to support an engineering culture that is powered by systems thinking.