Real time simulation in product development

At the same time as structural stress calculations in steady state situations become more complex and more accurate also simulation of the temporal behaviour of design details is developing quickly. Through advanced integrated design tools simulation studies will soon becoming everyday practice. But simulation techniques have a much greater potential than this. The vision is that the complete design can be simulated accurately enough to produce what is being referred to as a virtual prototype. Because variations to the design can be reflected quickly in the model, virtual prototyping can be much more tightly integrated in an iterative design process. The concept is of special interest in the case of human-operated products and in areas of industry where full-scale physical prototypes are either risky to operate or too expensive to produce such as in the defence or shipping industries. If a virtual prototype is to replace the physical prototype as a part of the design process, it must have the same dynamic behaviour, it must have a detailed and accurate visual representation and it must have a realistic user interface. In order to be a commercially attractive alternative it must also be quicker and, in the case of man-in-the-loop simulations, the user must be assured that the person involved behaves as in reality. The computer hardware to produce such simulations already exists. Currently available computing capacity and 3D performance are not the limiting factors. The bottleneck is still on the software side. Although new software emerge continuously much remains to be done before compatibility issues, software features, robustness of applications etc have reached a level when off-the-shelf products can play a part in building commercial virtual prototypes for real-time simulation. In this project some currently available software packages and future trends in modelling dynamic behaviour were studied. The focus has been on interactive real-time simulation of land vehicles to support virtual prototyping. It appears that the products available today still have a long way to go with regard to flexibility and ease of use. Recognised and widely used software such as ADAMS still lack the features needed for real time simulation. It is evident that market is quickly developing and that products used today may be outdated tomorrow while at the same time totally new products emerge. A strong trend is the integration of existing, well-established products into powerful integrated design and simulation environments. All this forces users to keep a view on the market and avoid locking their positions to single provider solutions that restrict migration to other products in the future.