Audi SIMDAT grid CAE to CAT integration project is a goer

Professor Ulrich Trottenberg, head of the Fraunhofer Institute for Algorithms and Scientific Computing (SCAI), which is co-ordinating the project, describes its objectives as “to demonstrate that the technologies allow all parties involved in the functional design of cars to access and leverage product development data across distributed locations and disciplines.” It’s about improving engineers’ ability to correlate data from simulations with data from physical tests. Hitherto, data sets have generally been stored in separate systems with different data models and no common interfaces – making correlation a tedious and error-prone task. The CAE-CAT demonstrator – developed by Audi (as the automotive application activity leader), MSC.Software and Ontoprise – provides the integration via SIMDAT’s grid technologies. Prof Trottenberg also makes the point that the system uses semantic technologies to enable integration of heterogeneous data models – thus proving the value of combining the two technologies. As a result, users are now able to view and compare mixed data from both CAE and CAT, he says, navigating through CAE simulations and CAT experiments, and accessing corresponding data such as curves, movies, values and pictures. “Advances in CAE, CAD and CAT technologies and processes have contributed significantly to the ability of the automotive industry to keep up with these requirements,” says Audi’s head of CAE Methods, Dr Karl Gruber. “The SIMDAT CAE-CAT integration demonstrator was developed to meet these challenges, and Audi will evaluate its usable industrial solutions and competitive advantage for the automotive application area.” SIMDAT is funded under the EUC’s Information Society Technologies Programme (IST), contract number IST-2004-51143.