NAFEMS Americas and Digital Engineering (DE) teamed up (once again) to present CAASE, the (now Virtual) Conference on Advancing Analysis & Simulation in Engineering, on June 16-18, 2020!

CAASE20 brought together the leading visionaries, developers, and practitioners of CAE-related technologies in an open forum, unlike any other, to share experiences, discuss relevant trends, discover common themes, and explore future issues, including:
-What is the future for engineering analysis and simulation?
-Where will it lead us in the next decade?
-How can designers and engineers realize its full potential?
What are the business, technological, and human enablers that will take past successful developments to new levels in the next ten years?

Resource Abstract

Historically, efforts to democratize simulation and modeling have been half-hearted at best. While we have seen a few forward-thinking companies embrace the concept (and reap significant rewards), most companies see it as an unnecessary luxury. Most companies still regard modeling and simulation activities as an expense, and democratization only adds to this expense.

And there’s the fundamental issue; modeling and simulation, like most R&D activities, is still seen as a cost.

Democratization of simulation models for use by other engineers and scientists does not change this. In contrast, democratization of simulation models for use by staff OUTSIDE of traditional engineering or R&D groups can take simulation out of R&D expenditures and instead associate it directly with revenue. Examples include deployment of engineering tools to customer-facing staff such as sales & business development, enabling the scaling of engineered-to-order products; another scenario - democratized simulation tools used to train operators, directly reducing the training costs and reducing costs associated with operating errors.

In case you think this is a fad, and of limited value, or only relevant to certain industries, let’s imagine our companies and the products we make 10 years from now, or perhaps less. Do we believe our customers will be satisfied ordering “off-the-shelf” products when our competitors are offering a high degree of customization – at no extra charge, and without any compromise in the quality of the engineering going into the product?

Put another way - if you’re still in business 10 years from now, you probably won’t be selling off-the-shelf products. Most products will be custom built - and therefore custom designed - to the customer’s specific requirements. 3-D printing and other manufacturing techniques make this almost inevitable.

Incidentally, we are seeing this trend in other industries such as healthcare, for example - see “Personalized Medicine Market Emerging Opportunities, Growing Demand and Significant Trends by 2026” https://www.globalbankingandfinance.com/category/news/personalized-medicine-market-emerging-opportunities-growing-demand-and-significant-trends-by-2026/ .

However, many products where some level of customization is desirable will still need to be modeled to ensure the customization itself does not result in a failure. Having expert modelers do this will not generally be feasible. Instead, the modeling activity needs to be deployed out to the appropriate part of the business (sales, training, etc.) and integrated into existing tools such as CRM.

Furthermore, this exponential increase in modeling will set the scene for more advanced techniques which are not as resource-hungry as conventional modeling, for example machine learning based methodologies – see “A Real-Time Physics Informed Predictive Analytics Digital Twin for Thermal Mechanical Fatigue”, J. Betts, Front End Analytics – NAFEMS World Congress 2019.

Some examples will be presented:

Democratization of structural analysis on built-to-order automotive components at ZF

Incorporating engineering and analysis into the proposal generation process at GE

Deploying optical analysis tools to non-engineers at Visioneering Technologies

Automation and streamlining the certification of electrical equipment at Schneider Electric

Automation of CAD generation as part of the proposal generation process at Siemens

In summary, the democratization of modeling and simulation to functions outside engineering can directly contribute to revenue, rather than always being seen as an expenditure.