Knowledge Based Simulation Driven Design for Crash Applications

Abstract

This paper focuses on industrial design and crash simulation. Indeed, crash simulation has progressed considerably to become a key area in product design, especially in auto motive industry. The main object ive of this paper is to show the role of the numerical simu lation on the design process and to explain its integration in this process. Actually, we can now talk about a strong connection between the simulation and the design process. It allows significant gains, however it highlights the problem of co llaboration around knowledge in the design process. Indeed, each expert model is driven by specific data which are shared by several users and used at the same time in a concurrent engineering context. Thus in this paper, we propose at first an assess of differents kind of crash simulation integration on design process and their benefits/limits. Then we propose an approach referred to as KCM -Knowledge Configuration Management, based on management of fine granularity knowledge in configuration. This approach is likely to imp rove collaboration between project participants, improving capitalization, traceability, reuse and consistency of the knowledge used simultaneously on several activities in parallel within the design process. Finally, the purpose of our paper is to find new ways to further optimize the simu lation/Design integration through an approach of knowledge management which is a new challenge today in industry.