Simulation Knowledge Management

The quest for cost efficient engineering of high-performance products that are capable to address the growing variety of customer needs and expectations is forcing product development teams to revisit their design processes with a focus on “intelligent” components, product modularity and high variability while at the same time preserving quality and safety standards. This is impossible to achieve with a design process that relies on end-of-chain validation by physical testing and the occasional usage of models and simulation to understand design issues in nearly-finished products. Product Development organizations are on a fast track of inverting their design paradigm from “data from design drives the modeling” to “modeling drives the design”. Models are becoming the primary assets, capturing the engineering IP, fostering and accelerating product innovation and securing product quality. In order to be able to scale the engineering and design organizations to this ambitious objective it is imperative for modeling and simulation teams to resolve their “data safari”, leverage tools for enterprise-wide model exchange and re-use for the execution of simulation-based verification requests. In this paper, we present a knowledge management system to support simulation-based design verification. The central component of the application is a semantic model for a verification request, which described the related CAE/CAD data together with its contextual information across the digital thread. This defines a structure for a knowledge graph database, which is populated through automated meta-data extraction along the validation & verification process. This technology allows for advanced search functionality and content-based recommender systems. We demonstrate how this technology enhances the user experience of existing simulation process management software by facilitating quick and easy re-use of CAE/CAD models.