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

Open source simulation software is pervasively available in many diverse forms and platforms. It has been used for both simple and complex analysis tasks. Further, in-house software and morphs on open source software are frequently developed to meet organizational objectives or reduce costs of analysis. While open source and custom codes have areas of strength, this is frequently offset by significantly missing functionality which detracts from being able to adopt a specific open source code to cover the full range of problems encountered in an industrial setting. Further, full-featured pre-and post-processing can be difficult or non-existent in the form needed for a given project or environment. Thus, use of open source and custom codes requires specialized capability often tied to a small group of experts putting the accessibility of the analysis asset at risk when a given human resource terminates. Another factor that impacts the adoption of open source and custom codes is a traditional suspicion and distrust of non-commercial solvers and associated behind the scenes data handling.
In this paper, we will detail the positive and negative aspects of open source and custom code relative to commercial full function codes for achieving end goal results. We will then examine how these problems are mitigated or eliminated utilizing Democratization and SimApp web interfaces.
We will also discuss some aspects of when one should or should not consider using open source vs commercial code for solving FEA (Finite Element Analysis) based structural problems.
Democratization will be discussed and illustrated as a method to parameterize and automate a class or family of products. Democratization automation includes the analysis from concept geometry to pre-processing, execution, and post-processing pass-fail decision making under compliance with analysis expert, regulatory and corporate standards. The Democratization automation end product is usable by non-experts which changes the resourcing model significantly for accomplishing analysis tasks.
Because Democratization inherently creates a new analysis process flow, we will examine the differences in resource and cost model when Democratization is used as a framework for executing analysis tasks.