This presentation was made at the 2019 NAFEMS World Congress in Quebec Canada

Resource Abstract

Product life-cycle in industrial organizations experiences several stages starting from ideation of the product up to its commercialization and recycling. During the whole product life-cycle stringent quality requirements are implemented at each stage. Typically in the automotive industry, a product could be a vehicle, a system, a system of systems or a component such as Electronic Control Unit (ECU) or a functionality for the component such as the fuel injection feature in the ECU. In this context, simulation plays an important role in the development process of these products, due to its capability to support the early time to market demands and to handle efficiently the increasing complexity.



Decisions based on simulation however pose several challenges, for instance in applying unified standards and methods to ensure confidence in the associated artefacts. Particularly in organizations where the system, component and function development is distributed across several teams, groups, departments or even different companies those challenges are more pronounced. Despite the existence of several standards to build credibility in modelling and simulation, the incorporation of a unified standard in the product life-cycle of interacting cross-organizations is still in its infancy.



This paper reviews the state-of-the-art modelling and simulation standards and proposes measures and methods for ensuring capability of simulation based decisions within each stage of the product life-cycle. The proposal encompasses several factors such as ensuring the credibility of data used for modelling and simulation, identifying the sensitivities of the model parameters, quantifying the uncertainties, verifying and validating the model and also the complete simulation environment. Apart from this, a strong emphasis is put on the seamless traceability of the simulation task and its artefacts, to ensure a holistic product liability not just for the duration of the product life-cycle but also for the re-usability. In addition, the present paper aims at addressing the challenges and demonstrating the applicability of the above-mentioned measures and methods to contribute to the transformation of the product life-cycle by making capable simulation based decisions.