MODSIM Processes

Optimize the way you add value by leveraging simulation processes throughout your product creation chain.

Sustainability is the guiding principle of our times. Like smart industrialization, it calls for new ways of managing the product lifecycle, and it turns MODSIM, the modeling and simulation process, into a key competence. The use of simulation along the entire product creation chain opens up new approaches to virtual validation and offers a knowledge-driven means of finding optimal solutions to the way you add value.

Importance

MODSIM processes: Potential for your business

Modeling and simulation enable digital twinning of products or systems, offering a wide range of potentials that help you achieve your product lifecycle management (PLM) goals.

The process opens the gates to a virtual test lab in which businesses can boost efficiency, sustainability and innovation while saving costs and reducing time to market cycles. Any strategic move to digitalize product creation must therefore include simulation as a key element.

In many industries, it’s already a truism that development of new products is no longer financially viable without simulation. In the automotive sector, for example, simulation shortens development times of complex product systems from several months to several weeks. Dassault Systèmes quotes a figure of 90 percent less development time.

MODSIM is a multi-purpose tool for sustainable product creation. It reduces material input, saves resources in production and increases quality and longevity – the list goes on.

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Modeling and simulation during all phases of product creation

In almost any context of product creation, simulation can offer insights that help your experts optimize the process as a whole. To achieve this, however, you need to make the MODSIM process widely accessible and no longer treat it as an isolated, specialized discipline.
Relying on simulation from the earliest possible stage – i.e. the concept phase – means fundamentally boosting your potentials in product creation. Simulation driven design provides your designers with a means for approaching questions by way of numerical simulation. The iterative process of testing, optimization and qualitative validation of properties and functions thus already begins during the conceptualization stage.

The scope of early insights also extends to functional simulation at the system level. Here the goal is to test and refine the initial product specifications. This is not based on the CAD geometry. Rather, the system is physically represented via a so-called 1D simulation, an instrument being used more and more widely e.g. in the automotive industry.

As an iterative process, modeling and simulation

helps resolve cross-board as well as sub-system issues
provides a sound basis for management and technology decisions

Because the concept and specification phases are now partially connected, both phases operate more efficiently – all the more important as the variety and complexity of requirements increase and the need for testing grows apace.
Simulation driven design also holds a wide range of benefits for your innovative capability. Because it permits systematic testing of new designs on virtual models, knowledge based engineering can generate innovative new design proposals by enabling systematic testing of ideas on virtual models.

This boosts collaboration between your designers and simulation experts, exerting a positive influence on your first-time right rate and saving costs because you need to do less testing on physical prototypes: Many questions can already be conclusively resolved by cross-board use of modeling and simulation.

During the concept phase, modeling and simulation also has potential in terms of frontloading. With the knowledge gained from MODSIM, your designers can identify potential weaknesses in a product and resolve such issues at an early stage. This is a great deal more cost-effective than taking corrective action further downstream.

Added value

Why are MODSIM processes important to your business?

Assuring quality

Simulation lets you systematically test and enhance product properties and functions, guaranteeing durable, high-value products.

Achieving business targets

You develop better products at lower cost and roll them out more quickly, benefiting your customers and your business.

Promoting sustainability

Form follows function – and saves resources. Additionally, the use of optimized materials and production processes minimizes resource consumption.

Individualised advice

Why CENIT

How modeling and simulation add value

MODSIM processes support your management and your technical units in decision-making on system design and deployment. A variety of methods deliver information for course-setting at all stages of product creation.
Manufacturing businesses use simulation e.g. to:

validate requirements (simulation engineers)
obtain qualitative information on components (designers)
develop new concepts (systems engineers)
optimize production parameters (production engineers)
optimize a wide range of product requirements

Confronted with a dynamic market environment and complex product requirements, manufacturing businesses need as much information as possible as quickly as possible. Simulation now benefits from highly sophisticated software and growing computing power, including cloud resources. For efficiency and speed, the key consideration is a meaningful integration of simulation with product lifecycle management processes and data.

What simulation can offer you today

multi-prong approaches to multi-physical phenomena
quick results for variant-rich products
twinning for continual improvement

Process steps

To find the rights answers, you have to ask the right questions. What precisely is the issue, and how can modeling and simulation help resolve it? For example, you may want to look at a product’s functionalities, performance and reliability under various operating conditions and outside influences. Or you may want answers to production-related questions, e.g. whether lower-cost procedures are viable.

Modeling generates a mathematical model that replicates all relevant dimensions. The system’s boundary conditions are derived from the respective problem definition. This is where the actual simulation comes in: The model is resolved and the validation criteria can be visualized in 3D or graph view.

Evaluation, optimization and digital twin evolution

Evaluation yields conclusions which prompt changes in design, technical properties, materials and/or other requirements. Aided by modern software applications, the model can be developed into a digital twin, e.g. for continual improvements based on a variety of changing target values.

Further pages on the topic

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Transformation

How do you successfully transform your simulation?

In future, simulation will play a crucial role in product creation. The keys aspect to giving it that role is harmonizing the interfaces in your processes and your IT. The transformation must be driven by the end-to-end principle. An example: For collaboration purposes and at the data level too, you must ensure that your simulations are based on the very latest data. Redundant work not only reduces your productivity – it’s also unacceptable in view of the pervasive shortage in skilled labor.

The transformation toward a product creation system with a coherently integrated MODSIM process should be your prime objective, because your need for simulation results will continue to grow. In many businesses, the simulation experts are already at capacity limit. Therefore, developing a simulation strategy can already give you more efficiency today.
Because simulation driven design offers many productivity benefits, it should be part of this strategy.
This approach gives you:

fewer loops between design and simulation
a shorter path to the validated product (first time right)
fewer standard questions for the calculation unit to process
greater capacity for complex modeling and methodology development

The simplified simulation tools used by simulation driven design are integrated with your CAD software applications, meaning that your designers don’t have to acquaint themselves with the highly complex tools used by your calculation pros.
Nevertheless, these and other changes associated with the wider role of simulation mean that you must pay more attention to organizational development. The units involved in product creation must be aware of the opportunities they gain from the transition and understand your digital twin vision. To be able to start on the same page, your employees need the right skill set as well as shared access to the new methods and state of the art technology.

How can you optimize your MODSIM processes?

by installing integrated end-to-end data and process flows
by incrementally introducing simulation driven design
by closing gaps regarding material properties and tolerances

Download our eBook to discover how your organization can benefit from our partnership and integrating modelling and simulation processes. Download e-Book

What are the tasks for your IT and your applications?

Consistent data models and end-to-end digital processes are a basic prerequisite for efficient MODSIM processes and reliable assessments, and one that can be achieved with the product development platforms offered by commercial software providers. They also provide the means for making the digital twin the centerpiece of development collaboration.
For simulation to assume its new role in product creation, your users must be able to operate the relevant applications without special computing skills. With the tools now available, this is no longer a problem. Additional security comes from guided workflows and simulation templates as well as modeling standards – they make it possible to compare data and provide an additional way to increase efficiency in MODSIM processes.
Transforming your IT in this way also benefits the way you manage your simulation data. If processes and data are consistent, each step can be documented easily, enabling simulation data lifecycling and full traceability.
In terms of IT, the wider use of simulation tools in product creation may encourage you to consider software-as-a-service models, because these let you respond more flexibly to fluctuating demand.
Cloud usage is another decisive consideration in reacting flexibly to computing needs. Cloud computing can replace those computer clusters that cost so much to maintain, and graphic processors can speed up your calculations. You benefit because your computing capacity grows, and given efficient parallelization you can drastically reduce your computing times.

Service

Simulation Services for Engineering Accelerate product innovation and reduce costs with simulation-driven decision-making. Read more about

Solutions

SIMULIA SIMULIA is a PLM solution from Dassault Systèmes, to which special software products for simulation and numerical… Read more about

The shortcut

The shortcut to innovative products

First time right instead of trial and error – that’s MODSIM in a nutshell. Right from the start, it lets you optimize the way you develop your products in terms of design, material properties, functions and manufacturing procedures, and continually adapt them to changing requirements or regulations. To benefit from simulation at this level, however, you absolutely need end-to-end digital processes. These guarantee that you are working with the latest data at all times and can therefore achieve complete and precise results.

And those results don’t just deliver resource-saving concepts, they also enable new and innovative product designs. In short, modeling and simulation can transform your entire development division and give your business the means for developing better products more quickly than your competitors.

Making product creation future-proof

Shorter development times and reduced time to market: An achievable goal thanks to modeling and simulation across all development phases.

Harnessing the digital twin to redefine added value

Simulation brings ideas and abstract CAD models to life – and down the road, it paves the way to the virtual twin experience.