“You probably saw our recent acquisition of Comet Solutions and thought, ‘Why’d they do that?’” writes Aras senior vice president of strategy Marc Lind. “Well, that’s a good question.” For background, see our Aras acquires Comet Solutions: Giant leap forward in simulation at enterprise scale, published here last September.
“As everyone knows,” Lind observes, “the amount of simulations being conducted has increased substantially over the past decade, and is projected to grow exponentially moving forward with the:
- Need to further reduce physical testing,
- Complexity of smart connected product design / MBSE,
- Push for predictive maintenance through Digital Twins.”
Aras says it views simulation “in the context of the overall systems engineering process together with configuration and change, variants, requirements, validation testing and others. The fact that simulation management is completely disconnected from mainstream engineering processes is a problem—no closed-loop traceability/digital thread.”
“Persistent problems”
According to Aras, what its largest customers say is that “simulation process and data management (SPDM) from the other major PLM providers are primarily standalone systems optimized for their own tools sets [and] treat others as second-class citizens.”
The result? When simulation environments are “isolated in silos, bad things happen:
- Simulation results aren’t used or are too late to be useful,
- Models get out of sync with the product design,
- Wrong design gets simulated.”
And Aras calls these problems “just the tip of the iceberg. Without a new approach to SPDM, many of the strategic imperatives/Digital Transformation goals that rely on simulation will not be attainable.”
“Consistent needs”
Global companies “must be able to increase simulation coverage of all types while staying in sync with design/model changes,” the company insists. “They’ve got to rapidly conduct analysis on product variations, options and concepts with repeatable processes.” Which means that “SPDM needs to be able to handle the full range of commercial tools, along with custom in-house tools, Excel and others.”
Putting its finger on one of the thorniest challenges to date in integrated, full-lifecycle engineering modeling and simulation, Aras adds, “It also means SPDM must be capable of managing mixed-fidelity models (0D/1D/2D/3D) and a wide variety of different data types. You will need multiple representations of the same item, and engineering objects should be captured independent of the underlying tools.”
Accomplishing that requires “vendor-neutral/tool-agnostic data and processes in SPDM, and a deeper level of understanding and control over the models is required—not just at the file-level—which means a unified data model in the PLM platform.”
And finally, says Aras, “Scalability has been a big problem as well. A new level of scalability is necessary moving forward.”
Aras perspective
Aras believes that “better data management and tool chaining are necessary in SPDM because they’re foundational to Digital Thread enablement, closed-loop verification, and future scenarios like machine-driven analysis. SPDM should be ‘invisible’ so that analysts and experts don’t have to worry about:
- Where the CAD file came from,
- Which HPC cluster to run on,
- Where results get stored,
- Report generation.”
“Our approach to SPDM shoots to eliminate these redundant administrative tasks, and expose results throughout mainstream engineering processes.,” the company says. “That means from concept engineering, detailed design, test, field operation and back to requirements across the full lifecycle as part of our PLM platform. We’re doing the same thing for simulation management that we’ve done for PLM: making it more open, scalable, flexible and upgradable.”
“To accelerate things,” the company explains, “we’ve acquired Comet Solutions—provider of best-in-class capabilities for simulation process management—which immediately enables repeatable process automation to complement our unmatched data management capabilities. While we’re working on SPDM projects with customers already, we’re going further and working to incorporate Comet into the Aras platform for even more seamless capabilities moving forward. We’re excited to have the Comet team join Aras and help drive our momentum in SPDM.”
Aras Simulation Process and Data Management
Ora Research white paper: AAM Sees Dramatic Productivity Gains, Cost Savings from Automating NVH Analysis Process with New Comet NVH Driveline SimApp
