Isight 4.0 Automates Simulation Workflows

We're all aware of what physical robots can do to improve production or manufacturing processes, but what about software robots? Dassault Systemes has the answer with the latest upgrade to its Isight package, which brings similar process automation to the engineering design process.

Isight 4.0, based on technology Dassault acquired in June 2008 from Engineous Software, is an open system for integrating design and simulation models created with various CAD, CAE and other design tool - and not necessarily only those from Dassault. Isight creates an integrated simulation process workflow across a variety of tools used by engineering teams, reducing the need to manually pass data back and forth between systems and greatly speeding up the simulation process. The resulting efficiencies from automating the simulation process workflows eliminate costly input errors and allow engineering teams to test and simulate more iterative designs, according to Alex Van der Velden, director of simulation lifecycle management at SIMULIA, Dassault's brand for simulation offerings.

"By creating a simulation process flow, you're formalizing the design process-now you know what you did to get certain results," says Van der Velden. "This makes engineering reusable because a (software) robot doesn't make mistakes. On average, an engineer makes an entry mistake once every 30 mouse clicks. All those mistakes add up in terms of designing products, but this is virtually error free."

Here's the way Isight works:  An engineer changes a parameter like the length of a cylinder, and Isight funnels that change through the proper sequence of all the software packages used to complete that engineering task. So for example, Isight would automatically open a CAD file, change the geometry, load the model into a post processor, create a mesh, run a solver, examine the results file and extract attributes like maximum stress. "Imagine that all the steps that the engineer does by hand like opening pieces of software or modifying parameters are now done automatically," Van der Velden explains.

What's new to Isight 4.0 are capabilities to make simulation process flows more reusable along with a variety of collaboration features that make it easier to work with different people and different functional areas of the enterprise. The software is "simulation agnostic," Van der Velden says, so it can be used with all the Dassault PLM and CAD tools, in addition to databases, CAD, CAE and simulation products from a host of alternative vendors.

Isight 4.0 provides an Abaqus Unified FEA application component as part of the base package, which enhances the use of SIMULIA's FEA technology within the Isight process workflows. However, enhanced support for scripting has also been added to enable Isight to accommodate custom components.