Engineering What's Ahead

The automotive industry is undergoing a disruptive transition: markets and regulations have become more demanding and require new technologies and business models. This influences how we work and also changes long-established development processes. Digitalization, virtual testing and simulation are essential ingredients to master those challenges. 

Ensuring that ADAS and autonomous vehicles (AVs) perform flawlessly during any driving situation, including adverse weather conditions (rain, fog, snow) and different traffic/driving patterns, is a key engineering challenge. Estimates indicate that billions of miles of road testing will be necessary to ensure safety and reliability. 

Electrification will drive future mobility and providers are pivoting to invest heavily in electric vehicles (EVs). The race is on to capture market share. Manufacturers must totally re-engineer their vehicles to satisfy driving range and battery life, safety and cost, requiring an unprecedented amount of innovation in a short time.  Only simulation enables you to accelerate EV development and win the race to market. 

Whether the application is future medical systems, autonomous vehicles, smart cities, AR/VR, IoT, or standard mobile communications systems, data integrity must be held to the highest standard. For these systems to reliably work, the physical data pathways must be well understood and reliably designed. Whether the pathway is inside a semiconductor chip or from satellites to ground, simulation of all multiphysics characteristics of devices used to control how data flows in the present and future data-enabled society is imperative. 

The aerospace and defense (A&D) industry has been at the leading edge of the development and adoption of simulation technology since the introduction of computerized tools. The reason is simple: It works in a high-reward/high-risk design space, in which the cost of failure is too high. An engineering success like the Space Shuttle’s first manned flight would have been impossible without the extensive use of reliable and accurate computer simulations that guaranteed all systems and components were working correctly. 

Sustainability aims to minimize human impact on the climate and environment by reducing our carbon footprint and designing eco-friendly products. Companies are taking responsibility to develop products that are more efficient, produce less emissions and use renewable materials. To accelerate the development of these products, they are turning to simulation. Simulation plays a critical role in meeting sustainability initiatives in four critical areas: GHG emissions and hydrocarbon release, energy, materials and environmental and human wellbeing. By using simulation technology in product development, engineers can design and optimize products to meet environmental standards, corporate sustainability initiatives and ultimately, saving our planet.