Grids for Industrial Product Development

Distributed virtual product development enables improved product quality and faster time to market while reducing costs and risks. It is, however, a complex task: data and processes have to be shared and integrated among departments and locations of a company, between different disciplines or across all partners that participate in a product development effort. At the same time, information that is confidential to a party must be protected. Grid technology promises to reduce this complexity substantially. The SIMDAT project takes industrial product and process development forward by introducing advanced Grid technology in the automotive, online dating aerospace, pharmaceutical and meteorological verticals. The results of SIMDAT will facilitate the transition of other industrial areas to Grid technologies.

Innovation and functionality

SIMDAT enables the use of collaborative process and product design by:

• creating federated (Grid-enabled) versions of established industrial Problem Solving Environments (like MSC SimManager™, ESI simulation database, LMS Tec.Manager™)
• providing analysis tools as services that can be invoked on a Grid (like PAM-CRASH™, MD Nastran™)
• enhancing Grid infrastructure software (GRIA and OGSA-DAI™) to meet industrial requirements (into the areas of basic Grid infrastructure, data access and virtual organisations)
• providing advanced Grid support for workflow and data access using semantic technologies
• creating a Grid-enabled version of the Weka data mining tool
• developing services for the extraction of knowledge

Target users/sectors in business and society

SIMDAT targets end-users in industry and services sectors that consider using Grid technology. In particular, it addresses companies and their suppliers and consultants that want to:

• share and integrate data and processes among distributed departments and locations or across external partners
• establish collaboration between different disciplines
• integrate and correlate design, simulation and physical tests

Overall benefits for business and society

SIMDAT will improve collaborative design processes and increase the competitive advantage in strategic European industrial sectors. Specific benefits expected include the improvement of car safety, reduction of noise and vibrations in cars, low-noise aircraft able to use short runways, faster and targetted drug discovery and development, enhancement of weather prediction and climate analysis.

---