Abstract

This presentation introduces the publication "How to get started with SDM" which was developed for the SDM Working Group to assist members who need to initiate a project to manage their simulation data in an information system. It describes the key features of an SDM solution and summarises twenty years of production experience of SDM in industry. Typically SDM has been deployed for critical processes such as automotive crash simulation or for new simulation processes such as Virtual Testing of critical systems. This ensures that critical simulation processes are secured and has been found to yield productivity and engineering throughput improvements. While SDM solutions have proved highly effective at leading companies, the overall adoption of information systems to manage simulation data by simulation engineers is low. Two reasons for low uptake are the cost and time to implement SDM and negative experiences of software offerings that lack basic SDM capabilities. Best practice to deploy SDM has been to implement one end-to-end process at a time, providing end-to-end process traceability. There are two principal disadvantages with this sequential approach: -Firstly, simulation engineers working in less critical domains have to wait potentially years to gain benefit from SDM. -Secondly, digital traceability of important simulation data-sets is incomplete until all domains have been implemented in SDM. This is unsatisfactory to support regulatory compliance in safety critical industries. it proposes a different, value-focussed approach to Simulation Data Management: to first deploy a System of Record (SoR) for simulation data on an SDM platform for all simulation domains. This delivers digital traceability of important simulation data-sets and provides value to all simulation engineers and to the enterprise immediately. Further benefits of this approach are that the repository of simulation information is valuable input to the deployment team and will accelerate the roll-out of full Simulation Data Management to all domains.