Software assessment for simulation lifecycle management

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Volume Title
School of Engineering | Master's thesis
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Date
2010
Major/Subject
Koneensuunnitteluoppi
Mcode
Kon-41
Degree programme
Language
en
Pages
77 s. + liitt. 4
Series
Abstract
The importance of simulation in product development is growing. In order to manage a rapidly increasing amount of simulation data and make the design process as a whole simulation driven, programs for managing the lifecycles of simulations are needed. To assess the suitability of a program for this purpose, an understanding of the features and tools required of such a program is needed. Because there isn't very much literature in this field, most of the relating issues must be studied from similar topics and elicited from experts working with simulations. Simulation data needs to be related to several kinds of data such as other simulation data, product data, or result documentation, and has a unique versioning and variant management scheme. Nevertheless, the tools and methods for data management remain the same as always, namely organizing the data in a structured way, indexing or naming the data according to some policy, creating links between data objects and filling in metadata. Any data management program should be able to do these things, so for this part even a product data management program would suffice. Managing the processes related to simulation projects is the area needing the most improvements. Optimizing a complex multi-disciplinary product is an iterative loop with several different special purpose programs involved. Not only does a simulation driven design process need to be mapped out, automating it will require lots of programming work, the most burdensome part being the integration of the different programs and simulation file formats. It is mainly the process management capabilities that distinguish one management program more suitable than another. Performing a case study on one program shows how well the theoretical aspects can be implemented in practice with current software. Other programs can be evaluated against these results. Managing simulation driven projects also aims at improving an organization's knowledge base. As batch processing capabilities constantly improve, methods for effectively utilizing the plethora of results are needed for creating knowledge. Transforming an organization's design process to be simulation driven is a long incrementally implemented evolutionary process. The organization's current processes and tools need to he mapped out along with a clear vision of what the desired state should be. An assessment of which programs are to he used is required as well as a roadmap of the various stages to be implemented in a suitable sequence.
Description
Supervisor
Juhanko, Jari
Thesis advisor
Makkonen, Petri
Keywords
CAE, data management, FEA, lifecycle, PDM, PLM, SDM, simulation, SLM
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