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

The democratization of simulation software has the potential to increase the number of simulation users by one or more orders of magnitude. Similar dramatic expansions of use of complex technologies have been witnessed in many other technology-driven industries such as automobiles, airplanes, personal computers and high performance computing, navigation systems, music devices, and communications devices such as phones. In each of these cases, the expansion occurs when the nascent, complex, hard-to-use technology is packaged into a form that is simple-to-use, robust, affordable and accurate. But this turning point is never simple to accomplish and hard to predict. However, when it does happen, it has always resulted in an explosion of investment and innovation that further drives the power and use of the underlying foundational technologies.

Simulation software is one such complex technology that the authors believe is close to the inflection point. However, while many end-user organizations have been successfully implementing the democratization process, progress has been slow. What are the challenges facing the democratization of simulation software? Why has it taken a while to get to this point, which is still not yet the turning point that is characterized by an explosion of usage? What are the key considerations for achieving safe and robust simulation democratization within a globally-dispersed and culturally-diverse organization?

The authors of this paper suggest answers to these questions based on many man-years of experience implementing and deploying the software that facilitates democratization, as well as actually implementing the strategies and tools needed to democratize simulation within their global teams.

Is the use of templates essential to the democratization of simulation? If so, how can these templates be made robust across an entire family of products that share a common functional architecture? The authors will provide an example of a graphical workspace that has facilitated the rapid creation of the simulation automation templates that are at the core of the SimApps used to drive democratization within a number of end-user organizations.

What are the essential ingredients of a successful implementation? What are the various pitfalls one must be aware of and what are some of the strategies that have been employed to overcome these? Can cultural barriers and the status quo derail an effort to implement democratization and how can one overcome these barriers? The authors will describe their experiences at GKN Driveline and NASA Langley - the challenges they faced and the successes of their approaches.