Abstract
Nowadays Concurrent Engineering is considered to be the most efficient way of shortening lead time and reducing overall development costs. However, in practice, this engineering concept presents certain special characteristics that need to be taken into account in managing numerical simulation and testing activities.
The high demand level imposed by the market precludes the use of experimentation as the only forecast tool. In this context, numerical simulation technologies are an indispensable complementary tool for avoiding other expensive and time-consuming activities making it possible to verify in advance whether the correct decision has been taken, hence reducing risks and enlarging the search area for possible solutions.
However, since numerical simulation is a relatively new technology, calculation departments are usually separate from the older testing and design departments. This situation originates different cultures that hinder the integration needed for a Concurrent Engineering environment. This is something that should clearly be avoided since the enhanced effectiveness of the testing and simulation activities is only attained by taking advantage of their synergies and through a mutual adaptation process. Another important issue is when to switch between simulation and testing to ensure optimum synergy.
This paper shows how functional analysis and failure mode analysis techniques, already widely applied in other fields, can also be used as links between the numerical simulation and experimentation activities throughout the design and development process. A detailed analysis of the product functions as well as of theirs failure modes, joined with an enough understanding of the implied parameters and of the existent physical relationships among them, constitutes the base to define a systematic approach to integrate both points of view.
Finally, attention is drawn to the emergence of a new engineering speciality: Simulation & Testing engineering. In the Simulation & Testing department, these two approaches are used together in a totally integrated way. In our opinion, this is the necessary condition for making virtual prototyping reliable, through an evolutionary process running from testing to simulation. Once this virtual prototyping process has been defined for each case, it can be shared with the design engineers to shorten the whole process. This will allow the testing activities to be brought into the earlier phases of the design with a high degree of reliability.