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Situation

European’s automotive supplier industry faces a constantly growing pressure on the more and more globalized market. Products with a constantly increasing complexity and the demand of a shorter time-to-market along with cost-reductions during the production process require new technologies to compete in the market. Small- and medium sized enterprises in the automotive supplier industry cannot utilize these new technologies, because they are not able to afford or operate such highly specialized hard- and software systems.

The provided technologies incorporate software systems for virtual prototyping in sheet metal forming (e.g. numerical simulations for deep drawing or kinematics simulations). The grid computing paradigm allows the on-demand utilization of computing resources to perform time-consuming calculations while letting the end user concentrate on the core competencies.

Challenges

Due to current trends in the automotive supplier industry like the increasing complexity of products, higher cost pressure, shortening the time-to-market, and the continuing trend of the big original equipment manufacturers (OEM) to source out even complete development tasks to the suppliers, virtual prototyping techniques to overcome this trends and to compete in the market became very attractive in the recent years.

Unfortunately, SMEs cannot afford such new virtual prototyping techniques due to high costs of hard- and software as well as experts to operate the simulation environments. Grid technology opens the door for SMEs to utilize virtual prototyping techniques over a network and hence assists to compete in the market.

Solution

Perspectives

The grid and portal solution developed within this business experiment illustrates the capabilities of grid technology in the engineering domain. Grid technology can be an essential part to overcome the business and market requirements of SMEs arising in the recent years.

What is required now is to build up confidentialness on the end user’s side to utilize a grid and portal solution to obtain simulation results based on tool designs that might even comprise company secrets. To support or boost this adoption process we have initialized some marketing activities, elaborating that grid is a stable, reliable and secure technology.

The obviously existing benefits of the grid solution in terms of cost effectiveness, quality and process improvements, and increased competitiveness in the market will convince a wide range of small- and medium-sized automotive suppliers to give grid a chance. Especially, the optimization capabilities of grid are very attractive for many suppliers.

Benefits for the End User

The benefits for companies wishing to perform such virtual prototyping techniques include:

• Access to brand new high-end simulation techniques like the DMU kinematics simulation of transfer systems.

• Ability to optimize multi-stage deep drawing processes on remote cluster resources.

• Cost effectiveness due to not required hard- and software systems as well as human resources to operate the simulation environments.

• On-demand payment for hard- and software for easier budgeting.

• Receiving competent consultancy from a simulation engineer to interpret the simulation results and develop solutions for design problems.

Partners

The University of Siegen leads the consortium involving Co.Com, an independent CAE technology and process provider, SCAI, a leading grid and numerical simulation researcher, T-Systems SfR, a telecommunication research unit of T-Systems, and FIUKA, a medium-sized automotive supplier.