Ansys ModelCenter-Connecting System Requirements to Engineering Analysis

ModelCenter simplifies engineering workloads by automating repeatable tasks and creating direct links between engineering tools and requirements. Users have gone from a few simulations per day to hundreds. Organizations can now shift resources left, reducing developmental costs while accelerating the time-to-market.

 

Early Concept Design Exploration	Integrate MBSE to Analysis & Simulation	Automate Any Tool
Open Architecture	Behavioral Simulation	Easy-to-create Engineering Workflows
Automatically Execute Workflows	Make Better Decisions	Explore Trade-Offs
Identify Problems Early	Increase Collaboration	Model as a Service

Model-Based Engineering processes require an intuitive, flexible and open framework

 

ModelCenter implements Model-Based Engineering processes flexibly. With ModelCenter, engineers can create and maintain a library of modeling and simulation tools and engineering workflows. You'll automatically execute the workflows, leverage high-performance computing resources to perform trade studies, and ask "what-if" questions. Best of all, these workflows connect to a systems architecture model to perform Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE).

 

Key Features

Drive innovation and improve product quality by enabling users to thoroughly explore and understand design alternatives, make better decisions, and find optimal solutions.

 

Connect Your MBSE Systems Architecture Model (SAM) to Any Engineering Analysis 

ModelCenter provides a graphical user interface for executing the connected ModelCenter workflow. Analysis results can be used to check requirements conformance, with unsatisfied requirements automatically highlighted. Trade studies can evaluate different design configurations and optimize the system design. New design configurations can update the systems model.

 

Simulate Complex System Behaviors

ModelCenter permits engineers to connect any analysis to behavioral diagrams created using NoMagic MagicDraw/Cameo or PTC Windchill Modeler. The integrated model (behavioral diagram plus analysis) results in a high-fidelity system simulation allowing engineers to accurately VERIFY system behavior and performance early in the design cycle, reducing costs and designing better products.

 

Automate the Execution of Any Modeling and Simulation Tool 

ModelCenter provides users with tools and methods that allow them to automate the execution of any modeling tool. Examples include user-created tools and scripts, legacy FORTRAN/C++ programs, spreadsheets, mathematical models, databases, and Computer-Aided Design (CAD) and Computer-Aided Engineering (CAE) models.

 

Author Engineering Workflows

Once a few software tools are automated, ModelCenter's drag-and-drop graphical user interface can be used to assemble these tools into a complete engineering workflow. An engineering workflow specifies the order and conditions of how and when to automate the tools. Like flowcharts, workflows can contain branches, if-then statements, loops, etc. Execute the workflow – automatically.

ModelCenter's Link Editor allows you to specify the data transferred from one tool to the next when the workflow executes. Your workflow may contain tools that run on any number of different computers and operating systems.

 

Explore the Design Space and Gain Insight into the Design Problem

Analysis and trade-study results can be used to significant trends and trade-offs. Once a repeatable engineering analysis process is created, engineers can repeatedly execute the process (using parallel computing resources if available). Each execution corresponds to a different set of inputs. Engineers can explore and quantify the performance, cost, reliability, and risk of many various design alternatives in a relatively short time.

 

Design Optimization and Paramter Identification (Calibration) 

Ansys optiSLang's powerful algorithms and automated workflows build on the earlier steps of sensivity analysis to provide a wizard-driven decision tree to recommend the optimizer with default setting. 

 

The optiSLang program determines the optimal design parameters for various multidisciplinary, non-linear and multicriteria optimization tasks. Based on the earlier steps of sensitivity analysis, optiSLang has already identified the most relevant parameters and can perform a pre-optimization on the chosen metamodel. Its wizard-based interface provides user guidance to recommend the optimizer from available algorithms such as gradient-based methods, adaptive response surface method and more, including custom optimization algorithms. You can even forward optimal design candidates from one loop to the next to streamline and standardize your work.

 

Robust Design and Reliability 

Product performance is often subject to scattering properties due to manufacturing tolerances, material scatter and other stochastic effects. Stochastic analysis and statistical methods like optiSLang's are key to ensuring product quality. 

 

Similar to sensitivity analysis, robustness analysis identifies the most important scattering variables and offers a decision tree to select the most appropriate algorithms to verify robustness and reliability for your product or situation. This is key for designs that have to meet high safety or quality requirements with event probabilities of less than 1 out of 1,000. A reliability analysis can quantify the probability of exceeding a limit and prove it to be less than the accepted value. optiSLang’s powerful algorithms help ensure product quality, minimizing scrap, recall and the risk of legal action.