Designing and manufacturing large and complex high technological products and consumer experiences like a modern vehicle is a monumental undertaking. It involves thousands of engineers and developers from various disciplines. The development process is normally siloed, inefficient and often results in wasteful and expensive rework as not all stakeholders have access to a single source of truth.

What if they could work together on a multi-disciplinary virtual prototype to simulate exactly how the product will be used before ever building a physical prototype?

That is already possible, using model-based systems engineering (MBSE), a methodology that focuses on creating and exploiting system models as the primary means of information exchange between engineers, rather than on document-based information exchange.

This approach will streamline the process of innovations, harness the creativity of those involved in the project and speed up the time to market. It will also allow the teams to move beyond the pitfalls of informal conversations where critical information could potentially be lost in the process of trying to exchange data.

Having a 360-degree visibility including social collaboration of the entire development process and environment also allows for improved productivity and quality. This is a key benefit of using a common infrastructure as in one development platform, and drives the digital continuity and integration of all R&D disciplines.

Peter Krantz is leading the CATIA software brand in Northern Europe for Dassault Systèmes. The CATIA solution involves the 3DEXPERIENCE platform, CAD and the company’s MBSE-solution. The MBSE solution is based on the technology of No Magic, a recently acquired company.

Peter Krantz defines MBSE as a common language and a nomenclature that describes a system and its requirements, functions, logical architecture, and its physical representation in the virtual world.

Our 3DEXPERIENCE platform delivers an integrated model based system engineering environment to imagine, engineer and experience high fidelity digital replicas that accurately predicts a product or system behavior, just like in real life. Here we can run trials of systems and subsystems and see how they interact, long before we have a prototype, he says.

One can look at how a modern vehicle is developed to understand the reason behind why MBSE and the 3DEXPERIENCE platform should be at the heart of the system’s development process.

80% of vehicle innovations today come from embedded systems. These systems account for 20-40% of a vehicle development costs, and they could typically deliver 7,000 technical and customer orderable functions that are defined by more than 300,000 requirements.

The massive number of possible vehicle configurations makes it impossible to manually fully analyze the interaction of any one system with other systems.  For a vehicle there is now also a need to verify not only the physical safety and traditional crashworthiness, but also the functional safety standard ISO 26262.

This type of complex product could never be developed without the systemisation that MBSE offers, says Peter Krantz.

Today, more and more products are becoming smart and the customers expect a smartphone to interact with other new appliances. MBSE could thus be used in most industries.

The technology is now affordable even for smaller companies. However, the challenge is more on the digital transformation within an organization or over a complete supply chain, to agree on one common language and a methodology. Dassault Systèms can help businesses to implement a MBSE-solution as well as providing the relevant tools, consultancy and training to achieve success. This is the future of engineering, says Peter Krantz.