Industry Summary Articles

For all the talk about the democratization of simulation, here’s how much of the work still gets done today: A highly trained expert, often with an advanced degree, toils away on a local desktop, gathering data, building models, running simulations and then circulating a report that sums up his/her findings to colleagues throughout the design process.

The increasing complexity of products — more reliance on cyber/physical systems and especially software — calls for more pervasive use of simulation, performed regularly throughout the design cycle, not just at the back-end for validation. In the new model-based design approach, simulation data and results need to be widely and continuously shared with the rest of the engineering organization, even if the skilled analyst remains the epicenter of simulation work. The requirement is prompting renewed interest in simulation data management (SDM), not just as a separate enterprise hub for managing simulation data and processes, but as an integral part of the broader product development lifecycle.

“It gets to what is the strategic value of simulation as a whole in the product development process—that’s what’s changing,” says Don Tolle, director of the Simulation-Driven Systems Development practice at CIMdata. “People are seeing business cases that support the need to do simulation early and often. If you’re going to get value out of all this simulation work, you have to manage it. Otherwise it’s just chaos.”

While the market for SDM is still relatively small — CIMdata sizes it around $50 million — the category is becoming more popular and expanding from its roots in the automotive sector as a repository specifically used to manage car crash simulation data. Heightened interest in the Internet of Things (IoT) and the debut of the digital twin concept, which made a splash this year as a way to create a mirror image of a product that bridges the digital and physical worlds and captures behavior, is also encouraging more widespread use of simulation.

As a result, engineering organizations are increasingly open to finding new ways to manage simulation data and processes, not as an isolated silo, but rather as part of the overall development process and design platform, Tolle says. “The old design paradigm moving to a model-based paradigm is what is getting us over the hump,” he says. “It’s not quite a wave, but [adoption] is building.”

To read Beth Stackpole's full article, please click here.

Search for SDM on CIMdata.com