User-Centric Traceability for Simulation-Informed Decisions

Simulation is a key pillar to master the virtualized product creation technology and thus to harness its typical benefits in improving costs, time to market and quality. Thereby, simulation is not a new, but a well-established method already widely-used within today’s product engineering and release decisions. However, the cost and efficiency potentials can be further exploited by increasing the share of decisions based on credible simulation results.

In this context, the introduction of a Simulation Process and Data Management (SPDM) system provides orchestrated and traceable simulation data for the decision-makers to support the judgement of simulation result credibility. The paper presents the results of a user-centric development process (user experience UX) of the data management software and proposes a comprehensive traceability framework.

The UX study revealed the pain points of the simulation engineers in data management and confirmed the importance of the usability perceived by all users. Furthermore, the study also shed light on the different needs from different simulation domains. Though, the UX process rendered the traceability as a central pain point which is experienced in all simulation domains. In order to provide a remedy for the traceability demands we present a framework which is capable of addressing all domain specific requirements. In addition to that, the traceability framework also supports the simulation engineers and development teams as well as the decision-makers with an automated and guided documentation of the engineering process.

The proposed traceability approach within SPDM follows a credible simulation process and enriches the simulation data by context information using a standardized schema to holistically describe the entire process between the engineering and simulation task and the corresponding decision based on the simulation data. The traceability is demonstrated with a real-world use case allowing the decision-makers to understand the simulation data with respect to the engineering task and hence establishes the fundament for simulation-informed decisions.