 |
|
|
|
 |
 |
|||
 |
|
|||
 |
|
September 2008 |
||
|
|
||||
| Laurent Bernardin, Chief Scientist and Vice President of R&D What trends are affecting the way users use your software? Systems are getting more and more complex and design cycles are getting shorter. Virtual prototyping takes on a more crucial role in the development process and model-based-design takes on a whole new meaning. Today's models need to be based on the underlying physical laws to guarantee insight and accuracy. Sophisticated simplification techniques are required to make these models practical, both in terms of simulation time as well as testability.
How is this affecting the way you will design the next generation of your software? Our release of the MapleSim pilot is just the beginning. We are working on tools that will take more and more of the grunt work out of the development process, thus enabling the engineer to focus on the creative parts of the design work. Mathematical equations are generated automatically and can be inspected in order to improve the insight into the model behavior and to assist in the controller design. Errors are detected early and potential problem areas are identified automatically. Fast, high-quality HIL code generation right from the simulation model delivers production-ready results. At the same time, integration with the Maple Technical Document Environment means that all the steps in the design process are automatically captured for review and re-use. Are there any simple ways you see for automotive engineers to improve the intelligence of their development processes? One key is to start moving away from traditional signal-flow simulation tools that require a lot of tedious and error-prone up-front work to manually derive the differential equations before they can be coded into a block diagram. Modeling tools like MapleSim that allow you to connect physical components such as gears, electric motors, joints, springs, dampers, etc, (MapleSim ships with over 400 of these components), provide engineers with a quicker and more reliable way to a system-level simulation model.
What are you doing to make the software more useful to engineers? Engineers today need to be instantly productive with new tools, out of the box. At the same time we understand that companies have existing processes and toolchains, and we take integration challenges very seriously, spending a lot of energy on making sure our products work well within an existing toolchain. How do you see the software industry evolving in the next five years? The software industry will keep doing what it has been doing for the past 50 years: Getting rid of more and more manual grunt work, thus freeing engineers to focus on what humans do best: creativity and problem solving. More innovative ideas will be needed to keep pushing software tools ahead. Existing tools will reach their natural limits and will be replaced by new software systems that can keep up with the changing needs of the engineers as they tackle more complex design challenges. |
Maplesoft’s mathematical software product Maple has been used by OEMs as well as Tier 1 and 2 suppliers throughout the world for many years for technical calculations, advanced mathematical analysis and design documentation. We recently launched MapleSim, a modeling and simulation environment that has already attracted a lot of attention in the industry. MapleSim’s key advantage is the ability to automatically generate the system of equations for complex simulation models built from physical components and traditional signal-flow blocks. We have also been working with Toyota for almost a year now on customized tools for advanced physics-based plant modeling, using our unique symbolic computing technology. LINKS Ansys: multi-physics analysis pays off. Read more... Integrated: Electromagnetic CAE tools that combine FEA and simulation. Read more... Lotus: vehicle dynamics made quick and easy. Read more...
|
|||
