This presentation was made at CAASE18, The Conference on Advancing Analysis & Simulation in Engineering. CAASE18 brought together the leading visionaries, developers, and practitioners of CAE-related technologies in an open forum, to share experiences, discuss relevant trends, discover common themes, and explore future issues.

Resource Abstract

There is increasing recognition of the value of democratizing the use of engineering software into the hands of more users. The vision for achieving this next step in the use of CAE tools has many aspects and projected benefits. Companies want to enable more engineers to be able to perform sophisticated simulations. This requires easy to use apps that help engineers solve a specific problem. The use of apps captures and transfers corporate knowledge, reduces the reliance on key individuals, increases the productivity of more engineers, improves quality and reduces errors. It increases the ability for the non-expert to perform analysis tasks that traditionally only experts have done. Democratization of engineering analysis drives greater value from the investment in software by expanding the number of engineers who are able to get reliable results. Experts, in turn, are freed up to spend more time on innovative and higher level projects. This vision however can be extended further beyond CAE to also include the integration of analysis of physical test and real-world sensor data. And if these apps are available through a web interface then no local software even needs to be installed.
The challenge for engineering companies is how to do this without costly, internally driven developments that are difficult to maintain and extend. It is also necessary that these apps can be easily created by engineers themselves and do not require software development skills and custom IT projects.
This vision of a “democratized” way of engineering requires the ability to put the power to democratize directly into the hands of engineers. This presentation describes capabilities required to make democratization a reality.
For engineering apps to be viable, they must be easily created to target a specific type of task, leading users through the process in an easy-to-use web interface that hides the complexity of general purpose analysis tools. Engineers with sufficient engineering expertise but little programming experience should be be able to build these apps using simple drag and drop building blocks. This means the logical steps of the app and the layout of its graphical interface can be defined by the engineer without any coding.
A central location is required to store and find these easy-to-use applications. Apps can be shared with individuals or groups to control user access but still with the flexibility to enable global collaboration. Built-in version control ensures engineers across the organization, whether in test laboratories, validation groups or design departments can always access the latest and correct version. Results from apps should be able to be shared with users in a secure manner improving the traceability and efficiency of communicating key information. The results from these analyses are stored together with all the inputs and settings so that previously calculated results can be quickly and directly accessed.