As product design moves more and more into the virtual world, ESI Group (ESI)has been at the forefront of virtual prototyping for some time. The computer-aided engineering (CAE) vendor helps companies optimize their design process by using software solutions to test product designs thoroughly before committing to physical prototyping. This capability is now expanding with the announcement of a long-term strategic partnership between ESI and PARC, a Xerox company.
ESI’s is adding to its virtual prototyping, manufacturing, testing and performance analysis with a partnership with PARC. This partnership will bring a custom R&D and technology solutions, with a bold strapline of being “in the business of breakthroughs” to ESI users.
The initial focus of this partnership will be to use ESI’s established expertise in virtual prototyping to expand and industrialize PARC’s fault-augmented model extension (FAME). This tool can be used to quantify the potential reliability of a system at a relatively early point in the design process and thereby identify and eliminate reliability issues at relatively low cost while the design is still at a flexible stage.
This partnership demonstrates a continued commitment to investment in system simulation by ESI, following up on the acquisition of CyDesign Labs in 2013 and more recently ITI GmbH, to bring the SimulationX package into the ESI offering. This new link with PARC adds another string to the ESI systems modeling bow.As Tolga Kurtoglu, vice president and director of the System Sciences Lab at PARC, said of the partnership:
“Industrial manufacturers want to minimize the cost of complex systems while maximizing performance. Design teams need to be able to quantify reliability and mitigate risk at the earliest phase of the process. We will work with ESI in partnership to help customers identify problem areas, gain insight and quantify the impact of component failure through time and use of a manufactured system’s lifecycle. Mature and complex industries, including transportation, aerospace, defense and energy, will benefit from our FAME project, and we are thrilled to work with ESI Group to bring these capabilities to customers around the world.”
“We are honored that such a highly regarded organization as PARC, with extensive expertise in system diagnostics, prognostics and condition-based maintenance, has chosen ESI to industrialize one of [its] breakthrough technologies.”
“Building on our existing expertise, the results from research conducted at PARC will enable ESI to deliver industrial solutions to answer system-level challenges and to leverage the data generated by our customer systems during operations.”
This announcement is certainly promising for the future of virtual product development. Given the skills and tools available on both sides of this collaboration, we could see some really exciting developments in the field.
With more robust and reliable predictions available in the virtual world, this further reduces the requirements for physical prototyping in early stage product development, leading to better product designs at a lower cost.