Auto-3: Crash Compability Prototype

The growing competition in the automotive industry requires continuous reduction of development and innovation cycles while simultaneously fulfilling increasing demands on quality and safety and comfort. The use of Grid technologies enables the automotive industry to efficiently solve such complex problems. To improve car safety beyond currently practised standard tests this prototype has been developed: It conducts compatibility crash simulations between cars from different car manufacturers using the SIMDAT Grid infrastructure. The Grid security technologies deployed allow each car manufacturer to see only the results of his car.


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The crash compatibility prototype demonstrates that a major step towards realistic simulation of accidents can be achieved by doing a virtual car-to-car crash test between 2 vehicles of different manufacturers, whilst preserving the Intellectual Property Rights of the involved companies. Proving the ability to solve such complex industrial use cases through Grid analysis services was the major goal of this development and we can consider that it has been reached, especially regarding the security aspects.


Summary

(Left: Traditional Car Crash simulation against deformable barrier) 


Justification of the prototype

An effective and secured collaboration between several automotive partners forming a Virtual Organization has been made possible by making full use of the Grid infrastructure developed during SIMDAT. In particular, thanks to the provided technologies, the developed solution fulfilled the requirements of the different parties regarding the B2B relationships and the protection of the confidentiality of their data. Combining this infrastructure with dedicated analysis services, industrial software for CAE data management (MSC SimManager, ESI VisualDSS) and elaborate workflow (built with Inforsense KDE) to automate the process, resulted in a usable industrial solution for the defined use case.


Achievements

By applying similar solutions to other use cases, this solution can be transposed to other types of problems, thus encouraging the safe collaboration of Automotive companies through the set-up of Virtual organizations working on joint projects. This new kind of cooperation will be beneficial to the automotive industry in general, contributing to the improvement of the safety and performance of cars, e.g. Likewise, collaborative design between OEM and suppliers can also be an obvious extension of this prototype, allowing all the parties involved on a car project to assemble their data on a common platform without disclosing their specific proprietary knowledge to each other.


Future Plans

It is planned to deploy the Crash Compatibility prototype at the production environment at RENAULT. The adoption of a grid-based solution by end users takes time because OEMs are still reluctant to transfer their data outside of their company even when the security is guaranteed. Another prerequisite for the emergence of virtual organisations is the existence of accredited service providers bound to legal obligations of confidentiality, which is a new type of business to develop.


Crash compatibility scenario involving 2 different vehicles form different manufacturers