Siemens PLM says synchronous technology set to speed complex modelling 100-fold

Siemens PLM Software (formerly UGS) is the developer, and the company says that essentially it accelerates CAD through ‘synchronous technology’. Launched via a global webcast timed to coincide with last week’s Hannover Fair, Siemens’ patent-pending technology is said to combine the best of constraint-driven techniques with direct modelling, and is being integrated into the company’s next versions of NXTM and Solid Edge software. Says Anton Huber, CEO of Siemens Industry Automation Division: “Siemens recognised the huge potential of synchronous technology during the due diligence process of acquiring UGS.. Knowing that the digital model is at the heart of our shared vision to unify the product and production lifecycles, we have worked together to accelerate this breakthrough in CAD.” And he explains: “The digital model impacts every phase of the PLM [product lifecycle management] process and is key to delivering innovation faster than ever before. This technology will fundamentally change the way manufacturers design products, and enable them to accelerate their innovation process, ultimately driving increases in top line revenue.” It’s certainly true that complexity has dogged feature-based modelling pretty much for ever. Everything works fine for smaller, relatively simple models, but when they grow and features become more interdependent, complexity becomes a problem. Breaking through this has been a priority for the industry, and while Siemens hasn’t revealed the detail it does look promising. In essence, the technology simultaneously synchronises geometry and rules through a new decision-making inference engine, which accelerates innovation in four key areas. First, it speeds up the capture of ideas, importantly also defining optionally persistent dimensions, parameters and design rules at the time of creation or edit, without the overhead of an ordered history. Second, it speeds up design changes by automating implementation of planned or unplanned alterations, while simplifying editing, regardless of design origination. Siemens PLM claims that hours of work can be reduced to just seconds. Third, the new synchronous system improves third party CAD re-use, without remodelling, by enabling users to edit CAD data faster, regardless of the design methodology – in particular using ‘suggestive selection,’ which automatically infers the function of design elements without the need for feature or constraint definitions. Finally, Siemens PLM Software says that the technology provides “a new user interaction experience that simplifies CAD and makes 3D as easy to use as 2D”. “While there have been important advances in 3D over the years, designers have not been able to create persistent features without computational overhead to re-compute models from the construction history,” insists Chuck Grindstaff, executive vice president of products at Siemens PLM Software. “Traditional parametric modelling serially applies rules to geometry, helping to automate planned change, but not addressing engineering changes. History-less modelling concentrates on geometry in an unconstrained manner, but sacrifices intelligence and intent. Direct editing minimises the need to understand a complex history but does not address features. “Our new synchronous technology incorporates the best of constrained and unconstrained techniques to deal with change in an extremely powerful and efficient manner.”