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MBS Simulation Management


Vision

Create an environment to define and run multiple MBS simulations without direct MBS solver software interaction.

For a given result, be able to trace back  the models and parameters used in the past to create exactly this result (The Five Ws).

Being able to recreate any simulation of the past by keeping track of the simulation definitions, not the final models themselves.

Motivation

  • Avoid cluttered – possibly locally and strongly focused – models, tools and scripts of various departments or even simulation engineers – the “spaghetti-environment”
  • Remove non-productive searching (save up to 30% of your engineers’ times), enhance data retrieval and conserve knowledge – query and identify items by meta data, extending a numbering/naming scheme
  • Boosting your teams and engineers individual productivity by automation
  • Enable, encourage and utilize simulation engineers collaboration and concurrent engineering
  • Ability to define and automate simulation processes
  • Have a central, structured and versioned models and parameters database, accessible to all simulation engineers
  • Use a modular approach: assemble complex MBS simulation models automatically, remove redundancy
  • Reduce time needed and tighten the human error prone simulation setup process rapidly
  • Usage of trackable MBS model data, as well as documented model parametrization
  • Avoid likely errors and cost in human interaction during model setup and simulation control
  • Provide standardized output and postprocessing
  • Know for a given simulation result the model configuration and parameters that were used to create exactly this result
  • Keep track of the model definitions and parameters, rather than the whole model itself
  • Provide a reliable MBS simulation process, yielding high quality results

Solution – The MBSManager application

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MBS Simulation-Data-Management: Keep track of the “Data” in the multi-body-systems simulations.

The data:

  • Parametrized model definitions (your MBS models, usually by text-files)
  • Model parameters separated from MBS models (defined in xml-files)
  • Metadata (descriptive items relevant to the simulation or components of the model, defined in xml-files)
  • Any other data items relevant for your simulation

For FEA-Simulation environments, Process&Simulation-Data-Management approaches are being developed.
Aiming at the general problem, however, these FE-oriented Process&Simulation-Data-Management general solutions are very complex, expensive and laborious to administrate, some say “heavy”. Thinking of MBS, they are not the utopian “all-purpose solution”.
Academically correct, the non-MBS feature overhead is massive, like the tight integration with enterprise ERP or PDM (PLM) systems.
In FEA for example, the data defining the model is usually derived from CAD-Models, this is not the case in MBS simulations.
In a multi body simulation scenario, when applying these FE-oriented “canned” solutions, user acceptance will become a critical issue.

Probably you already established some folder structure for your simulation environment to organize your models and data. This is good.
But what about true versioning, engineers collaboration and traceability alongside your simulation setups and data management?
For the field of MBS simulations, PanzerEngineering offers an effective, non-monolithic and lightweight solution tailored for your field of MBS simulation.
The MBSManager application can be adopted to any MBS software solution (SIMPACK, Adams, alaska, Modelica, RecurDyn, etc.) relying on a text file based model description.

Features are the simplicity to use, the small footprint and the zero administration effort.