This presentation was made at the NAFEMS Americas Conference "Simulation in the Automotive Industry: Creating the Next Generation Vehicle" held on the 16-18 March 2021.

The automotive engineering community is now confronting the largest technology transformation since its inception. The demand to manufacture cleaner, safer, and smarter vehicles, along with providing an overall enhanced driving and ride experience, has never been higher. As a result, engineering teams must discover, evaluate, and successfully implement leading-edge technology and methods to produce reliable, effective results.

Hence, the challenges for automotive engineers are enormous and require a significant increase in the upfront use of numerical simulation capabilities, methods, and processes such that they’re able to efficiently design, manufacture and deliver these innovative technologies to market in greater speeds than ever before.

Resource Abstract

The MIT Lincoln Laboratory is a US DoD Federally-Funded Research & Development Center (FFRDC) chartered to apply advanced technology to problems of national security. There is an initiative at Lincoln Laboratory to implement many of the best practices defined in the DoD's Digital Engineering Strategy, which promotes the use of digital representations of complex multidisciplinary systems and components and the use of digital artifacts to design and sustain national defense systems.



MIT LL is utilizing a low-code platform to create and maintain a custom digital thread, capturing and connecting data from requirements to systems models, to engineering data and simulation, back to requirements for Verification & Validation (V&V), and manufacturing. A primary goal is to bring simulation out of its traditional silos, significantly increasing its impact on the development of complex products that are, in many ways, similar to those in the current automotive industry – satellites and sensors that must be autonomous, have electronics and software on-board, and communicate with other systems to perform their tasks robustly and in real-time.



In this session, Justin Rey, who leads the simulation aspects of the digital transformation initiatives at MIT Lincoln Laboratory, will present an overview of the Lab's Digital Engineering Initiative, including why simulation data and processes need to be an integral part of the digital thread and the system development process. This will be followed by an interactive, visual demonstration of this digital thread, covering requirements, systems modeling and simulation, and closed-loop V&V.