Large Scale Digital Mockup

The problem

Nowadays most engineering organisations involved in product development have a need to represent their products digitally. This is fine for relatively small products, but it can soon become difficult working in the complete model as the size of product increases.

This particular customer is no different and has the need to build very large DMUs or Digital Mockups. It uses the full mockup to investigate design faults on a daily basis using simple visual inspection or more detailed clash and interference detection. With a product that has in excess of 100k CAD parts, many configurations and which is managed by multiple PDM systems it was found the standard off the shelf applications could not cope and they needed a bespoke system that would pull all the information together onto standalone workstations. This would enable any DMU to be available overnight or on demand and most importantly up to date.

Accepting that some problems inevitably occurred, reporting was also required to indicate missing parts or failed conversion to help establish the integrity of the DMU being used for the design project teams.

Our solution

Xype used its knowledge and experience with PDM/CAD systems to create a solution which enables key users to input their DMU requirements on an overnight/daily or long term basis and then have the results distributed to workstations across multiple sites.

The first part of the process was to build, master and then store the DMUs by communicating with the PDM systems for the up to date structure/assembly and configuration details. As 100s of separate DMUs were required for the start of the working day the whole process had to be managed within a tight overnight time window. This was done by utilising the power of the design office workstations which were not in use overnight, avoiding the need to buy expensive DMU servers.

Following on from this, each nominated DMU machine would then synchronise its local disks with the central geometry store to ensure the DMU could be loaded as fast as possible.

Finally, we introduced a simple user interface to allow the users of the system to access their DMUs together with the report information on any converter failures.

The key benefits for the customer were...

These combined led to higher turnaround in design decisions and identification of problems as the DMU could be reviewed daily rather than weekly.