Next Level Engineering: Digitalization of know-how in vehicle development скачать в хорошем качестве

Next Level Engineering: Digitalization of know-how in vehicle development

As presented by Mr. Gagan Saket from BMW Group, at the 8th BEFORE REALITY Conference. Next Level Engineering (NLE) is a framework for a highly integrated working environment in the early development phases (strategy and concept phase). It allows reaching the functional targets in car development by taking into account design proposals certified by CAE simulations. A flexible parameterization and high-quality data management will facilitate the application of optimization technologies such as Machine Learning and others. The existing development methodology in vehicle engineering is insufficient to enable efficient and innovative concept development. The reasons for this are the ever increasing complexity and requirements of vehicle configuration through multiple variants, emerging drive train concepts and also requirements to enable autonomous driving. The development phase includes a pre-development or concept phase, which at the moment is approximately 18 months. In parallel to the pre-development phase, there are several other comprehensive vehicle overarching topics undertaken and executed in several specialist departments and these activities, depending on the complexity, consume a lot of effort and time. One of the main bottlenecks in these processes is the identification of root causes during the vehicle development to the functional verification and validation. In this established process of the series phase an iteration cycle takes approximately 3-6 months. This includes CAD design, CAE model generation, simulation and re-introducing optimization changes into the CAD design. Within this cycle the time for CAE model generation alone – starting with CAD geometry as input – is estimated with 4-5 weeks. In contrast to the series phase, the time for iteration cycles with NLE has been set instead of multiple months to only a few days as a target. This is due to a different approach: instead of using CAD data for a new concept, a predecessor CAE model is used as starting point for the simulation. This way, the number of iterations can be significantly increased, so that finally a concept can be validated within the demanded timespan. In this presentation, the concept of NLE will be presented. The technical challenges that are dealt with and how they will be solved is explained. Also, the IT-related challenges to support such an integrated environment will be addressed.