On the Credibility of Modeling and Simulation Results in Cross-Domain and Cross-Company Product Engineering

Modeling and simulation (M&S) are powerful approaches for reductions in cost, time to market and increased quality. Although M&S are well-established methods in today’s product development, decision makers tend to trust physical tests more than M&S – especially in release decisions. To establish and to increase trust in the M&S results and hence facilitating the full use of their benefits require a comprehensible assessment of the credibility of M&S results as well as the appropriate communication between decision makers and simulation engineers. There are several standards available which deal with the topic of M&S credibility. The majority of these standards, however, takes aim at domain specific or industry specific applications. Moreover, the lack of an industry-wide committed and accepted standard often complicates efficient and effective cross-company collaborations particularly for cross-domain products with increasing complexity. In this paper, we present and discuss a credibility of simulation framework recently developed at Bosch to enable simulation-informed decision making for Bosch’s complete spectrum of products for industrial, end consumer and automotive applications. The framework allows to treat both domain specific and cross-domain applications. The RB Credibility of Simulation Framework extends the classical credibility attributes, such as verification, validation and uncertainty quantification, by M&S error management and organizational capabilities to promote a systematical and transparent credibility assessment of M&S results and thus paves the way for comprehensible simulation-informed decision making. In this context, we also apply the RB Credibility of Simulation Framework to a real engineering use case to demonstrate how to transparently express the credibility of the M&S results. This provides the fundament for making informed decisions which are based on M&S results. Furthermore, we deliver insights into the current status as well as the outlook of the joint efforts of Bosch, NAFEMS, INCOSE, ASME and ProSTEP SmartSE to actively develop an international and cross-industry standard for M&S credibility.