CIMdata PLM Industry Summary Online Archive

2 April 2009

Company News

ESI Group and the SIMDAT Project Address the Challenges of Virtual Car Development

ESI Group announced its active involvement in the SIMDAT project, which has taken industrial product and process development forward by introducing advanced Grid technology in four different application sectors – automotive, aerospace, pharmaceutical and meteorological – in order to cover the full range of issues to be addressed in the design, development and production of complex products and services.

ESI Group’s collaboration has mainly been in the automotive cluster of SIMDAT, addressing the challenges of Virtual Car Development. The SIMDAT automotive activity has developed a variety of technologies and integrated them into industrial prototypes and demonstrators to develop improved product designs in less time at reduced cost by accessing this distributed know-how and deriving new information from it.

The Crash Compatibility Prototype

To improve car safety beyond currently practiced standard testing, SIMDAT partners such as ESI Group developed the SIMDAT Crash Compatibility Prototype. Indeed, ESI’s PAM-CRASH software has been used to perform a crash compatibility scenario involving a car from Renault and one from Audi over the SIMDAT Grid infrastructure. The performance of the prototype has shown that a secured collaboration between two car manufacturers is feasible. In fact, although the crash compatibility simulation involved assembling two car models, the services deployed onto the Grid infrastructure ensured that each OEM could access only the results pertaining to their own car. This is made possible by the sophisticated security model developed to ensure the protection of the Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) of each collaborating party.

“The Grid security technologies deployed within SIMDAT allow car manufacturers to see only the results of their car. This improves car safety beyond currently practised standard tests,” declared Yvonne Havertz, Fraunhofer SCAI, SIMDAT project management.

The virtual prototype enhances crash safety in the development phase of a car and brings us closer to a fully realistic simulation of accidents.

ESI Group’s demonstrator

Another pioneering technology deployed in the SIMDAT Automotive project, considered as one of the most important, is Simulation Process and Data Management (SPDM). Various SPDM systems were involved in SIMDAT such as VisualDSS, ESI’s end-to-end decision support system. Using this solution, ESI Group and other SIMDAT partners deployed a demonstrator that automates the collaboration between a car manufacturer and a meshing supplier through the integration of a Grid meshing service into VisualDSS. The integration of Grid technologies into ESI solutions enables a secured collaboration between different third parties of a virtual organization.

“ESI Group’s demonstrator has been evaluated at RENAULT SAMSUNG Motors in Korea,” said Mr. Jae-Chul Lee, Junior Manager Body Design Operation at RENAULT SAMSUNG Motors in Korea. “To sum up, thanks to its data sharing and change management features, SIMDAT demonstrator brings even more fluidity in the generation of simulation models, which contributes to the overall productivity of the CAE department,” he continued.

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