The development of increasingly complex cyber-physical products poses severe challenges to engineering methods such as unlocking the virtualized product creating technology. Virtualized product creation is usually associated with improved costs, time to market, and quality benefits. In this context, simulation plays a crucial role as it contributes to those benefits. Simulation itself is already a well-established method used in today’s engineering and release decisions. Nevertheless, the cost and efficiency potentials can be further exploited by increasing the share of decisions that are based on credible simulation results. To allow engineering and release decisions in which simulation data are involved (i.e., simulation-informed decisions), all relevant data have to be orchestrated within the decision-making process. Simulation Process and Data Management (SPDM) is a system that puts therequired orchestration into execution and provides traceable simulation data to decision-makers. The orchestration has to be extended by an advanced traceability which also includes the context information (e.g., real test data and quality management information) relevant for the decision-making process. Thus, SPDM supports the assessment of the credibility of simulation results by relating the simulation data to their context and establishes the fundament to make simulation-informed decisions.

This article proposes an advanced traceability framework of simulation data within SPDM to enable simulation-informed decisions. Two aspects are thereby detailed: The importance of user experience for successful introduction into the organization, and the extension of the traceability by a credible simulation process which also respects data and information from different engineering domains.