CAE Optimization Creates Platform Based on Collaboration

Future of CAE Optimization and ESTECO

The human brain and acting based on instinct just don’t cut it anymore when it comes to the numerous trade-offs engineers can face in the competitive market.

And based on what Carlo Poloni, president of ESTECO, sees, things are only going to get more complicated.

“I believe that, today, 100 variables with 10 objectives is a challenging optimization but is physically possible,” noted Poloni. “Growing the number of variables by an order of magnitude would need another step. The big issue is the amount of data you generate, which would need a specific methodology to manage.”

“Today our system can save data and steps in the process so they can be recalled,” added Poloni. “Simulation is expensive, especially when you use a large HPC system for hours. You don’t want to throw out any of that data collected. But, if you grow the complexity of the problem, then it might become necessary to make those types of decisions.”

Poloni went on to explain that ESTECO’s optimization technology, modeFRONTIER, currently simplifies these large-scale optimization processes using tools like RSM and by decomposing the problem. This typically means using sensitivity analysis and other tools to eliminate variables that have little impact on the outcome. However, this becomes harder as you grow the variables and end up with more interaction within the problem.

So, as engineering teams are going to need larger and larger optimization problems to get the most out of their automotive, aerospace and large infrastructure designs, things will become a lot more complicated. It looks like ESTECO and other computer-aided engineering (CAE) optimization companies have their hands full.

But that isn’t the only challenge ESTECO faces. As Poloni noted, “The big challenge now is to execute our vision in a multi-partner environment. The infrastructure we have put together has the potential to be used for not just single enterprise organizations but multi-company partnerships like integrators and suppliers.”

The infrastructure Poloni was hinting at is the new collaboration software VOLTA. It is a web-based communication and teamwork tool that can be accessed on a browser. It ensures that members of a team are all working on what they need to work on in the way they are best suited to work on it. Typically, the tool is used within large organizations, but it can be expanded to multi-partner alliances.

ESTECO has also been doing a lot of work with respect to BPMN standards. This includes their new prototype BPMN editor, BeePMN.com. The purpose of this tool is to allow engineers to create process models that fit the BPMN standard and, in the future, will be compatible within their ESTECO workflows.

Poloni also thinks that optimization technology will play an important role in the world of the digital twin. He thinks that, when the data is collected, it can eventually be fed into modeFRONTIER and help to maintain the product and its production over time.

“There is a lot of work to do in the digital twin field,” hinted Poloni. “We work in the simulation environment, so it’s very natural to talk about the use of simulation to design, but once you have designed the product digitally, you might keep that data alive together with the product that is actually produced and continuously update the model to continuously follow the product on the market.”

When asked how this digital twin stuff would work, Poloni said that it would use KPI systems. The KPI layer of ESTECO could create a system that can interact with IoT interfaces to gather data to see how the product is responding in the real world.

VOLTA and modeFRONTIER

So, what is ESTECO up to as the corporation prepares itself for the future? Well, like many CAE vendors, the company is making a cloud-based platform. This platform comes in the form of VOLTA, which is ESTECO’s first step into a cloud-based, browser accessed, enterprise platform. The software will completely replace the company’s previous software offering, SOMO.

Poloni argued that, if you have non-experts that are decision makers and, thus, need access to the results of a project in VOLTA, this can spell disaster if an inappropriate role isn’t assigned. These individuals could accidentally change something while viewing the results. This can mean hours or days of delays, assuming anyone notices in time. But more on roles later.

VOLTA should not be confused with a PLM or PDM platform. It will be a web-based platform consisting of a collaborative environment that arranges simulation data and multidisciplinary processes. As a result, it will link to the aforementioned PLM systems. ESTECO’s enterprise platform will be able to work with these PLM platforms to pass information back and forth, but the optimization process will live within the VOLTA platform.

Poloni explained that VOLTA will run modeFRONTIER, modeSPACE, modePROCESS and any future software from ESTECO that would be complementary to the optimization process.

“This is a proper enterprise platform with all of the requirements that a system like this must have, but it is dedicated to the management of the iterative design process,” said Poloni.

Currently, VOLTA is compatible with PTC’s Windchill and Siemens PLM Software’s Teamcenter. The ESTECO team notes that any future PLM software compatibility will be made based on user demand.

Modularizing modeFRONTIER into modePROCESS and modeSPACE

One of the first steps ESTECO made to help VOLTA achieve its purpose was creating two new products that offer parts of modeFRONTIER’s functionality, called modePROCESS and modeSPACE. Though it may not look like much, Poloni promised that the decision can mean a lot for big organizations with large engineering teams that need role definitions and are currently using bloated licensing. Users should note that the full version of modeFRONTIER, complete with all of its functionality, isn’t going anywhere.

modePROCESS will include all of the tools within modeFRONTIER that set up the problem and iteration. Think of modePROCESS as the pre-processor for the CAE optimization. modeSPACE, on the other hand, contains all of the data processing, analytics, data visualization and report creation tools of modeFRONTIER. Think of modeSPACE as the post-processor for the CAE optimization, though it does have some pre-processing tools. As previously stated, modeFRONTIER will still exist with all of this functionality.

Some users only know how to build processes. Others only know how to analyze data. Then there are experts that perform the complete process. Modules and VOLTA make it easier to set these users with permissions to only use modePROCESS, modeSPACE or modeFRONTIER respectively. This way there are fewer chances for anyone breaking anything, as they only have access to the tools they know.

“We decided to modularize our product to offer different capabilities and enhance specific capabilities of our products,” said Poloni. “Today, you would probably still buy modeFRONTIER but it will now be made from different modules that talk to each other and allow us to scale up the configurations and move them into an enterprise framework to supply a community that can balance different user permissions that access our products.”

“You need to allow people to do only what they are able to do. VOLTA is able to define roles of users in an organization and what they are responsible for,” explained Poloni. “This could be anything from model maintenance or the usage of the model.”

There are other benefits to the modularization method explained at earlier: licensing. By breaking modeFRONTIER into parts, organizations can buy more of one module than the other. This makes sense, as there are typically more people working on the data than framing the process. But the licensing advantage isn’t just at the purchasing level. It is also associated with the licensing usage. 

“This way, when you use modeFRONTIER, you might not completely lock a license, you lock on the module you are using at that particular moment,” clarified Poloni. “This will advance the number of concurrent users on the same license.”

In other words, people can work on both modeSPACE and modePROCESS at the same time, separately. This is similar to how you might have one engineer working on a preprocessor for an FEA analysis at the same time another engineer works on the postprocessing of the last simulation run at the same time.

BPMN Software to Define Engineering and Business Processes

ESTECO has created a web-based editor which can create these processes, called BeePMN.com. Currently, the software is a free working prototype with some interesting implications.

In the future, these processes could be understood by ESTECO’s other software and are also compatible with other BPMN workflows. The goal will be to bridge the gap between engineering and business teams so they will begin to speak the same language.

“BPMN is a business process modeling and naming process that formalizes the way to represent data transformation,” said Poloni. “This is a well known standard in information technology and there are many BPMN workflow creators in large IT companies.”

“We decided BPMN should be a standard for us and we think we are right because there will be a need to be compatible with the BPMN infrastructure as soon as engineering becomes part of the business decision,” added Poloni. “This means an engineer that builds a workflow in modeFRONTIER can export this workflow and it can be understood by IT people in the finance department and mapped on their processes if needed. This decision will close the gap between the simulation community and decision maker community.”

Though BeePMN.com is currently only an R&D project, an engineer can imagine that eventually VOLTA and modeFRONTIER will be able to execute these workflows and integrate them into an optimization iteration. This could theoretically integrate business optimization into engineering optimization, helping to ensure a more financially successful design.

Either way, bridging the gap between engineering and business teams is just another way that ESTECO is attempting to bring company collaboration to light. It seems to be a very viable strategy and is currently working for other design platforms.

To learn more read: modeFRONTIER 2016 Adds User Profiles to Improve CAE Optimization Workflows.