daratechDPS AERO2003 Conference Wrap-Up
Close to 200 of the aerospace and defense world's experts in digital simulation gathered at the first-ever daratechDPS AERO2003 conference in Anaheim on November 3 and 4. Presentations ran the gamut from Dr. Ahmed Noor of NASA giving his vision of the design workplace of the future to the very practical experiences of CAE practitioners in CFD, structures and other analytical disciplines.
As is often the case at such events, there were experts, technology suppliers and those looking to make better use of the tools already in hand. Herewith, a brief summary of what we saw and heard during the two-day event:
- The human element is still critical, regardless of the advances in technology. Most presentations centered on giving trained engineers better tools, processes and work environments. As all three keynote speakers—Peter Shaw, Ahmed Noor, Rod Dreisbach—touched upon, the people and process issues involved in implementing advanced analytical solutions dwarf any software investment a practitioner could make. As Peter Shaw said, could it be that the technical challenges are the easiest to solve?
- The tools themselves are most effective when used in a well-thought-out and precise design process. The economic reality of the aerospace and defense industries is such that companies need to establish the best and most efficient processes they possibly can. When times were good, companies were able to purchase the latest and greatest technology, and incorporate that tool into existing workflows—often jamming a square peg into a round hole. Today, with tight budgets and reduced head-counts, process comes first, and tools are deployed and ultimately judged by their level of integration within the process. Report cards from aerospace and defense OEMs grade technology not on feeds and speeds, but on how well it gets along with others.
- We heard repeatedly that no tool lives in a vacuum and that interoperability and integration are key attributes of any technology solution. In a ten year program, implementing the latest CAE product may yield some benefit, but can also cause a great deal of disruption unless that product fits into the work-stream, operates the way people are used to operating, and "plays nice" with other tools. Sometimes products aren't even backward compatible with themselves let alone other systems. When new software comes out, it may have added functionality, but does it do certain things differently than in previous versions? Do teams need to be trained or retained? If integrations have been established with 100s of other applications, are they now to be broken and new ones formed? Great technology is not cut and dried thing.
- It is worth noting that, during session on technology interoperability and integration, many suppliers said, 'it is up to you, our customers, the OEMs in this industry, to force us to play together. If you tell us to do it, we will.' A gentleman from a large manufacturing concern later quipped, 'I've been telling them to do that for the last five years.' Clearly, there is still a lot of doubt about how interoperability will ultimately play out.
- While no one was willing to estimate, it is clear that the commercial (COTS) tools available today do not completely fill the needs of the aerospace CAE practitioner. In fact, for every one COTS application, there are perhaps 10 to 100 in-house applications. Some of these in-house apps do a very specialized analysis, others offer a "quick and dirty" solution to test a concept before a more robust analysis is performed. Technology solution providers are willing (to the extent described above) to integrate COTS apps; who will integrate in-house apps? They are not going away any time soon.
- We heard a number of speakers talk about the value of doing analysis early in the design process and, where possible, in parallel with other design tasks. The benefits of this approach are well understood on a conceptual level, but very hard for practitioners to implement. In some cases, it is a tool issue but in many, as we've heard from the questions asked, it's a matter of resolving people and organizational issues.
- If efficiency is all about not duplicating work, being able to quickly find what is needed, then data management is a critical issue as design cycles are compressed. We heard a number of speakers talk about the difficulties in data management—CAD models often have data that is inappropriate for analysis and so redundant models are built for various analysis codes. These variants need to be linked to their original CAD representations. This becomes very important when you have multiple representations for one physical object.
- A number of speakers were not convinced that putting analysis on every designer's workstation is a good idea—that misinterpretation of the results by people who don't know how to question the inputs and outputs is quite a risk. Others felt that designers could be trained to do basic level analyses, guided by wizards and strict adherence to design processes. And with backup from experienced "gray beards" as one speaker called them for issues that were more complex. It appears that the jury is still out on how widely and how quickly designer-level CAE tools will be adopted.
Finally, more that a few speakers pointed out the business reality prevalent in the aerospace industry—the "do more with less, more quickly, at higher quality" mentality that drives business today. They also pointed out that the only way to survive and perhaps prosper is to change the way business is done—redesigning processes, redeploying assets, and automating those tasks which can be automated. A lot of the technologies represented at daratechDPS Aero will ultimately do just that—and that's why Daratech remains bullish on the prospects for the digital prototyping space.
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