By Bruce Jenkins, President, Ora Research

Last month’s Release 2016a of MathWorks’ Simulink Design Optimization software includes a new sensitivity analysis tool to support design space exploration. The tool lets design engineers interactively conduct design of experiments (DOE) and Monte Carlo simulations of Simulink models.

What is design space exploration?

The most successful engineering projects begin with discovery—conceiving a rich array of ideas to solve a problem or address a need—then move on to methodically explore which design candidates are most promising for development and refinement. But the power of such discovery and exploration is too often sacrificed to schedule pressures and resource constraints, compounded by digital toolset gaps and limitations. The result is familiar: engineers conceive two or three design alternatives, then rely on intuition, best guesses and handbook formulas to choose one that looks reasonably promising and not too risky to implement—without really knowing whether it’s the best, most cost-effective or most robust solution attainable.

An emerging answer to this quandary is design space exploration—both a family of methods and a rapidly evolving category of software tools that are beginning to radically advance the capabilities of engineers and multidisciplinary engineering teams to discover an array of feasible design concepts early; quickly and fluently evaluate sensitivities, variants and tradeoffs; then select the best design concept and optimize it.

Design space exploration lets engineers systematically and automatically investigate very large numbers of design alternatives in order to identify those with the most optimal performance parameters. Many of the quantitative and algorithmic methods that underpin design space exploration have been long known—and sometimes applied, in cases where the attendant costs in expertise, time and labor could be justified. What’s changing now is the way fresh software technologies, such as the new sensitivity analysis tool in Simulink Design Optimization, are transforming those powerful but formerly difficult-to-apply methods into practical everyday engineering aids.

Design exploration vs. design optimization

Dr. Chris Mattson, director of Brigham Young University’s Design Exploration Research Lab, explains how design exploration and design optimization relate to each other, and how they differ:

“Design exploration is a particular way of arriving at an optimal design solution. To be formal, design exploration is the human-driven, often computer-assisted, divergent/convergent process used to evolve and investigate multidisciplinary design space with the intent of design discovery and to inform decision making throughout the design process.

“The essential difference between design optimization and design exploration is the method for characterizing the outcome. Design optimization strategies have two distinct parts; formulate and converge. Here it is assumed that the problem can be formulated before the search and convergence begins. Design exploration strategies, on the other hand, are based on the belief that the problem formulation evolves during the process of searching and converging, thus ultimately leading to a more informed optimal solution. In this way, design exploration is both divergent and convergent.”

What does this mean for how the problem is formulated and solved? Mattson continues:

“Design optimization depends on a well-posed optimization problem formulation, which generally includes (i) a well-defined objective function, (ii) inequality and equality constraints, and (iii) the expression of stakeholder preference, all of which are likely to be multidisciplinary in nature. In an arguably real way, such a problem formulation predefines the optimum solution, thereby allowing the mathematical rigor of the optimization to lead to the optimum design by an iterative, computational search.

“Design exploration, on the other hand, assumes that the optimal design is initially unknown and initially uncharacterizable. The process of design exploration discovers design conditions and little by little (often through some form of experimentation) characterizes what an optimal design looks like. Once this is known, the final solution can then be found through a convergent design optimization algorithm.”

Simulink Design Optimization

Simulink is a block diagram environment for multidomain simulation and model-based design that supports simulation, automatic code generation, and continuous test and verification of embedded systems. Within that environment, Simulink Design Optimization provides functions, interactive tools, and blocks for analyzing and tuning model parameters. Users can determine the model’s sensitivity, fit the model to test data, and tune it to meet requirements. Through the new Monte Carlo simulation and DOE capabilities, users can explore their design space and calculate parameter influence on model behavior.

Simulink Design Optimization also helps users increase model accuracy. It lets them preprocess test data, automatically estimate model parameters such as friction and aerodynamic coefficients, and validate the estimation results.

To improve system performance characteristics such as response time, bandwidth and energy consumption, users can jointly optimize physical plant parameters and algorithmic or controller gains. These parameters can be tuned to meet time-domain and frequency-domain requirements, such as overshoot and phase margin, and custom requirements.

New sensitivity analysis tool

Design engineers frequently need to determine how changes to the parameters in their model will impact the product’s behavior, MathWorks explains. By identifying which parameters have the greatest influence on product performance attributes such as fuel efficiency, engineers can gain confidence that their design meets the specified requirements. The new sensitivity analysis tool performs Monte Carlo simulations, which enable the exploration of a large design space. The tool lets users interactively specify multiple parameter variations, incorporate multiple standard and custom design requirements, and analyze the results of these simulations both graphically and quantitatively.

The results of sensitivity analysis can be used to directly influence the design, as well as improve the performance of numerical optimization tasks such as fitting models to test data and tuning models to meet design requirements. Two other Simulink toolsets, called Fast Restart and Parallel Computing Toolbox, can help speed up the sensitivity analysis tool’s performance.

“Growing design complexity is creating increasingly large models,” said MathWorks design automation director Paul Barnard. “To maintain model accuracy, engineers are challenged with identifying which model parameters impact behavior the most. Now, engineers can use Simulink Design Optimization to determine model sensitivity, fit the model to test data, and tune it to meet requirements.”

Ora Research
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By Bruce Jenkins, President, Ora Research

New tools for development of Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) and autonomous (self-driving) vehicles are highlights of Pro-SiVIC 2016, ESI Group’s latest release of the sensor simulation platform it acquired last year along with the software’s developer, CIVITEC.

Targeted primarily at transportation industries, ESI Pro-SiVIC lets engineering organizations virtually test the operational performance of the various perception systems on board a ground vehicle or aircraft design. By helping engineers build realistic, real-life 3D scenarios and experience them interactively in real time, Pro-SiVIC is intended to reduce or eliminate the need for physical prototypes. The software models environmental factors that influence sensor performance such as lighting conditions, weather, and other vehicles sharing the road. The goal is to let users quickly and precisely study the performance of embedded systems in both typical and critical use cases, to ensure the product will be safe and reliable in operation.

Accelerating design and prototyping of embedded control and security systems

Pro-SiVIC is the result of ten years’ research and development by the French Institute of Science, Transport Technology and Network (IFSTTAR). CIVITEC is an IFSTTAR spinoff formed in 2009 to productize this R&D, together with IFSTTAR’s know-how in perception sensor simulation and algorithmic development.

Upon acquiring CIVITEC in March 2015, ESI Group chairman and CEO Alain de Rouvray said, “This new expertise of assistance to human perception, coupled with the excellent IFSTTAR partnership, provides opportunity to take into account the interactions of a vehicle, or any other industrial product, with its scalable immersive environment. Once integrated into digital 3D modeling, it will enable dramatically accelerated design and prototyping of embedded control and security systems and thereby strengthen the value of our global solutions in virtual prototyping.”

de Rouvray continued, “For ESI Group’s industrial partners, Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) present a major technological challenge, as efficiency must be built upon the quality of interaction between digital modeling and human perception. The growing requirements in terms of active safety make it important and urgent to integrate ADAS systems in virtual prototyping, complementing the existing constraints of passive safety during product development.”

Integrating sensor models based on cameras, radar, LIDAR, ultrasonic sensors, GPS, more

Pro-SiVIC helps engineering and manufacturing organizations develop perception assistance systems from the design phase to final testing. “Implementation of such modules is highly complex, as it requires 3D modeling of ultra-realistic environment conditions, digitally transcribed using sensor simulation, and wrapped in an optimized interface that improves operators’ perception,” ESI notes. “The man-to-machine interface must provide the operator, such as a vehicle driver, with the best information available to enable him or her to make better decisions.” ESI observes that perception assistance systems are critical to the deployment of active safety systems, today considered crucial in the automotive and aircraft industries.

The latest release, version 2016, addresses sensor specialists, ADAS designers, and ADAS integration and validation teams. To support their daily work, Pro-SiVIC integrates sensor models based on a wide range of technologies including cameras, radar, LIDAR (laser scanners), ultrasonic sensors, GPS, odometers and communications devices. This makes the solution suitable for applications in industries that use sensing for systems command and control including automotive, aeronautics and marine. Sensors can be integrated into realistic 3D scenes; for automakers, for example, Pro-SiVIC provides environment catalogs containing representations of various road types (urban, highway, countryside), traffic signs and lane markings.

Pro-SiVIC 2016 introduces new radar sensor models that not only cover the functional aspect of the sensors but also provide detailed modeling of antenna characteristics and their impact on performance and on-board processing, plus the characteristics of radar targets such as radar cross-sections. These options result from the ability to couple Pro-SiVIC with ESI’s computational electromagnetics solution, CEM One.

ESI reports that Business France and BPI France, two leading organizations that promote international development of the French economy and foreign investment, have chosen Pro-SiVIC as one of eight French technologies for their program “Ubimobility—Connected Cars France,” aimed at helping French companies compete in the North American autonomous vehicle market.

Ora Research
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By Bruce Jenkins, President, Ora Research

A top CAE vendor has partnered with a world industrial giant to help engineering and manufacturing organizations capitalize on the Industrial Internet of Things.

Part of the recent agreement between ANSYS and General Electric expands GE’s use of ANSYS engineering simulation solutions to accommodate GE’s 2015 acquisition of Alstom’s Power and Grid businesses. But of broader import is what the deal will do to extend simulation beyond product development into operations—a key aspect of Predix, the new “Industrial Internet platform” from GE. Predix is an operating system and platform for building applications that connect to industrial assets, collect and analyze data, and deliver real-time insights for optimizing industrial infrastructure and operations.

GE characterizes Predix as “the world’s only industrial cloud offering designed specifically for industrial data and analytics across such industries as aviation, transportation, oil and gas, and healthcare. Organizations use this platform to create innovative Industrial Internet applications that turn real-time operational data into insights for better and faster decision-making while maximizing machine efficiency.”

Predix-based simulation-as-a-service apps will help analyze real-world performance of smart machines to better predict future performance

Leveraging its broad and deep portfolio of engineering simulation software, ANSYS will collaborate with GE Power Engineering to pilot new simulation-as-a-service applications built on Predix. These applications will help companies analyze the performance of smart machines in real-world operating conditions, then make confident predictions about their future performance. ANSYS explains the benefits: “Physics-based simulation with big data analytics and industrial devices augmented with embedded intelligence can reduce risk, avoid unplanned downtime and speed up new product development.”

The collaboration follows ANSYS’ announcement last September that it joined GE’s Predix Early Adopter Partner Program, through which GE provides training and co-development support for businesses getting started with Predix. The program is open to ISVs (independent software vendors) creating apps and services powered by Predix, technology partners creating Predix-ready devices and solutions, and systems integrators and consultants developing Predix-certified services.

Extending engineering simulation to the full product lifecycle

Engineering simulation software has traditionally been used in the design phase, where it has helped drive innovation in product design and development. “With the Internet of Things, simulation is becoming even more essential as advanced products now combine mechanical, fluid, electronics and embedded software,” ANSYS noted. “A complete systems-level model is now necessary to benchmark operational field data analytics with simulated system performance.” ANSYS said its collaboration with GE “will demonstrate the benefits of extending engineering simulation to the full product lifecycle, from initial design to operation and maintenance and back again to design of the next-generation machines.”

By combining machine connectivity with a data lifecycle management platform powered by engineering simulation, ANSYS and GE “will enable organizations to optimally design their products for the Industrial Internet, then take the data being relayed on their performance and use it in the development of the next generation of those products,” ANSYS concluded.

GE also partnered with PTC

This is not GE’s only such alliance with the engineering/manufacturing software industry. Around the same time as ANSYS’ initial announcement last September, GE and PTC unveiled a partnership to deliver a new manufacturing solution within GE’s Brilliant Manufacturing Suite, a set of technologies field-tested and optimized within GE’s own factories to help customers maximize manufacturing production performance through advanced real-time analytics.

The new GE-branded manufacturing solution “leverages the capabilities of PTC’s ThingWorx Industrial Internet of Things application enablement environment,” the companies said. “The result is an industry-hardened solution that features flexible dashboards and powerful data analytics integrated with GE’s software capabilities on the manufacturing plant floor.” The joint solution connects disparate systems from shop floor to ERP, and offers a dashboard and differentiated user experience with consumer-like drag-and-drop capabilities tailored to each user’s role.

All part of the GE Digital transformation

All these moves are connected to GE Digital, an initiative launched last September to bring together all the digital capabilities from across GE into one organization. The company said GE Digital would “integrate GE’s Software Center, the expertise of GE’s global IT and commercial software teams, and the industrial security strength of Wurldtech,” GE’s cybersecurity subsidiary.

Chairman and CEO Jeffrey Immelt explained, “As GE transforms itself to become the world’s premier digital industrial company, this will provide GE’s customers with the best industrial solutions and the software needed to solve real-world problems. It will make GE a digital show site and grow our software and analytics enterprise from $6 billion in 2015 to a top 10 software company by 2020,” when GE expects more than $15 billion in software and solutions revenue driven by Predix scale and internal productivity.

GE Chief Digital Officer Bill Ruh added, “Digital technologies and open-source software have transformed the consumer space in radical ways, but industry has been slow to adopt these new innovations. Now is the time to capitalize on the extraordinary opportunity to transform the industrial landscape by leveraging Predix to collectively build apps, which will reveal exponentially greater value than what we have seen in the consumer space.” GE believes the global industrial app economy could grow to more than $225 billion annually.

Ora Research
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