CIMdata’s Product & Manufacturing Innovation Driven by Digital Design & Simulation: Challenges, Strategies, Tools, & Best Practices for Business Success workshop, is the must-attend event for industrial organizations and product development solution providers interested in learning about “model-driven engineering” strategies and solutions that will enable ongoing product and manufacturing innovation to create competitive advantage, minimize total lifecycle costs, and drive top line revenue growth. It will provide attendees with independent experiences from industrial companies and a collaborative networking environment where ideas, trends, experiences, and critical relationships germinate and take root.

With the rapid advances in digital technology, the complexity of products is increasing exponentially due to more software and electronics content. And game changing new product development technologies such as additive manufacturing (3D printing), the Internet of Things, Industry 4.0, and “design to purpose” materials will require new approaches to product development. As such, there is a need to engage and collaborate across diverse engineering domains to develop better “systems-oriented” solutions and conduct a much greater amount of “virtual” experimentation to gain insights into key product benefits and performance parameters early and throughout the product life cycle.

Companies must adopt approaches that allow them to tap into collective intelligence to address their tough problems, and perform their ideation experiments in the context of systems much more efficiently and rapidly to be competitive in today’s globally connected economy. By creating a digital representation of the product from early concept development through detailed design and manufacturing, as well as by getting rapid insights from in-service operations, successful enterprises are minimizing time-to-market, product lifecycle costs, and warranty costs. While good progress is being achieved, there are still many challenges in successfully adopting and deploying these new technologies.

In this one and a half-day workshop, attendees will explore “model-driven systems innovation” from multiple perspectives including strategy, culture and process; key challenges encountered and effective approaches; and the solutions available to deal with these challenges.

Inspiration will be provided by relevant case studies from industry keynote speakers, as well as from CIMdata research analysts. Panel discussions and breakout sessions will provide ample opportunity to exchange thoughts, identify technology trends, and formulate ideas for implementation that participants can apply to specific business requirements. Attendees will have the opportunity to voice their concerns and opinions, discuss, and help formulate a unified position the industry can use to jointly guide solutions and move forward.

In this workshop we will explore the following topics:

• Achieving the Digital Thread Vision: The view from DMDII and the DoD/USAF of the challenges, opportunities, and program initiatives.
• The role of simulation in Model-Based Systems Engineering and enabling the Digital Thread for product innovation and sustainment: What are the approaches and tools that support efficient use of simulation to predict and optimize the performance of today’s complex cyber-physical systems that contain ever increasing levels of embedded software and electronics? What are the opportunities for improvement?
• Collaborative approaches, conceptual design tools, and simulation technologies to support better and faster ideation, problem solving, and decision-making.
• The business opportunity and process change challenges of a next generation “generative design” process leveraging innovative design and topology optimization tools in combination with Additive Manufacturing along with the associated new material characterizations
• Industry best practices and lessons learned in implementing simulation-driven systems development from industry speakers.
• Collaboration challenges across the model-driven product lifecycle including co-simulation and data interoperability standards across the engineering domains of mechanical, electrical and embedded software/controls to enable enterprise-wide collaboration, including with teaming partners and the design and manufacturing supply chain.
• CIMdata’s Enterprise Application Architecture framework: A Maturity Model to enable successful adoption of model-based technologies.
• Physics-based “digital twins” and the role they will play in the rapidly emerging Internet of Things (IoT) and Industry 4.0 initiatives.

What to Expect If You Attend

This will be a lively forum where participants discuss real issues and opportunities and share their experiences and insights into the discussion topics. They will also have their voices heard and opinions count in shaping CIMdata’s future research agenda. This event provides a forum to network with professionals from diverse industries, academia, CIMdata’s subject matter experts, and members of the CIMdata Knowledge Councils. There will be plenty time for open (and private) discussions and networking.