What are the benefits of a well-designed Simulation Template

What are the characteristics of a useful Simulation Template? What are the potential benefits? Is this just a theoretical discussion or are there real-world examples of implementations and the ROI that they provided? We will continue to explore these and many other relevant questions related to Simulation Automation Templates in this and future blog posts in this topic page.

I also encourage you to explore the rest of the content on this topic page of the RevolutionInSimulation portal, if your goal is to figure out whether and how to implement and deploy Democratization of Simulation within your organization.

So, what are the benefits of a useful simulation template?

Automation of complex simulation tasks provides significant efficiency gains. Routinely, I have seen efficiency gains of 90% and above, while increasing the accuracy and repeatability of simulations.
“Lights-out” automation (a manufacturing automation term) facilitates valuable capabilities such as Design Space Exploration (e.g., parameter studies, DoE, and optimization), Uncertainty Quantification, and Simulation Apps (SimApps) or Vertical Applications.
Capture your simulation best practices in an executable form (not just in documents that collect dust on engineers’ shelves!) and enforce these simulation best practices across the (global). organization – significantly increase accuracy and repeatability.
With the right safeguards built into these Templates by the experts, non-experts can safely and robustly run complex simulation. When done correctly, this opens up the power of simulation to a much larger group of people who can benefit from it, not just the experts.

Simulation templates must be created by the experts who know how to use complex simulation tools to get accurate results that can be safely used to make decisions about the potential behavior of a product design. Simulation is a powerful tool that can easily be misused – the appropriate use of simulation within an organization is covered by the Simulation Governance topic area on this site. The principles of good Simulation Governance must be brought to bear on the creation of templates, to ensure that they can be used safely and robustly by both non-experts and experts.

Major global organizations have, over the last few years, been implementing simulation templates and the web-deployed SimApps that drive them, and have demonstrated significant benefits. Some examples are American Axle & Manufacturing (AAM), GKN Driveline, Superior Industries, Intel Corp., NASA Langley, The Aerospace Corp., John Deere, Caterpillar, Intel Corp., and many others who are in the midst of implementing them.

With these significant benefits, why aren’t simulation templates ubiquitous? One roadblock to the widespread use of simulation templates has been the lack of a visual programming language and graphical tool to rapidly create simulation templates. In the past, the creation of a simulation template has required a great deal of custom scripting and programming, making it an expensive proposition and making the template difficult to extend and maintain. An example of a modern graphical workspace for the rapid creation of simulation templates is the Comet Simulation Automation Workspace.

I will address this and other relevant questions about the challenges of creating useful and usable simulation templates in subsequent blog posts.