Call it businessprocess automation meets engineering. DassaultSystemes' Isight simulation process automation and design optimization toolhas been upgraded with new methods and capabilities to exploit multi-coreprocessing along with a new licensing model designed to reduce cost.

Isight, from Dassault'sSIMULIA brand, gives designers, engineers and researchers an open system tointegrate design and simulation models created with diverse CAD, CAE and otherdesign tool applications. The software is designed to help automate theexecution of hundreds or thousands of simulations, saving time and helpingimprove designs by optimizing against performance or cost variables through statisticalmethods such as Design of Experiments or Design for Six Sigma.

The new Isight 4.5upgrade provides new scalable parallel algorithms for leveraging multi-corecomputing resources, enhanced approximation and reliability methods to evaluateproduct performance across a range of real-world operating variables,improvements to multi-objective optimization and data mining which providesdeeper insight into performance attribute tradeoffs. Dassault also released theSIMULIA Execution Engine (formerly Fiper) 4.5 for executing Isight simulationprocess flows across computing resources.

Customers will nowbe able to leverage the new parallel algorithm and optimization features inIsight combined with the distributed computing capabilities of Simulation ExecutionEngine to evaluate more design alternatives in less time, according to SteveCrowley, director of product management, SIMULIA, Dassault Systemes. This willresult in developing better products at a lower cost, he said.

In a related move, users of SIMULIA's AbaqusUnified FEA will benefit from a new licensing policy that dramatically reducesthe cost for using SIMULIA's Abaqus Unified FEA in automated design studieswith Isight. Using the combination of these products allows customers to reducetheir Abaqus token usage as much as 60 percent.