Bruce Jenkins is President of Ora Research, an engineering research and advisory service. Maplesoft commissioned him to examine how systems-driven engineering practices are being integrated into the early stages of product development, the results of which are available in a free whitepaper entitled System-Level Physical Modeling and Simulation. In this series of blog posts, Mr. Jenkins discusses the results of his research.

This is the third entry in the series.

My last post, System-level physical modeling and simulation: Adoption drivers vs. adoption constraints, described my firm’s research project to investigate the contemporary state of adoption and application of systems modeling software technologies, and their attendant methods and work processes, in the engineering design of off-highway equipment and mining machinery.

In this project, I interviewed some half-dozen expert practitioners at leading manufacturers, including both engineering management and senior discipline leads, to identify key technological factors as well as business and competitive issues driving adoption and use of systems modeling at current levels.

After identifying present-day adoption drivers as well as current constraints on adoption, finally I sought to learn practitioners’ visions, strategies and best practices for accelerating and institutionalizing the implementation and usage of systems modeling tools and practices in their organizations.

I was strongly encouraged to find a wealth of avenues and opportunities for exploiting enterprise business drivers, current industry disruptions, and related internal realignments and change-management initiatives to help drive introduction—or proliferation—of these technologies and their associated new ways of working into engineering organizations:

• Systems modeling essential to compete by creating differentiated products
• Mechatronics revolution in off-highway equipment
• Industry downturns and disruptions create opportunities for disruptive innovation
• Opportunities to leverage change in underlying industry competitive dynamics
• Mining industry down-cycle creates opportunity to innovate, find new ways of working
• Some manufacturers are using current down-cycle in mining industry to change their product innovation strategy
• Strategies of manufacturers pursuing disruptive innovation
• Best odds are in companies with deep culture of continually inculcating new skills into their people, and rethinking methods and work processes
• Some managements willing to take radical corporate measures to replace old-thinking engineering staff with “systems thinkers”
• Downsizing in off-highway equipment manufacturers may push them to seek more systems-level value-add from their component suppliers
• New technology opportunities inside manufacturers ready to move more deeply into systems modeling
• Opportunities in new/emerging industries/companies without legacy investments in systems modeling tools and libraries
• Best practice for introducing systems modeling: start with work process, then bring in software
• Capitalizing on engineering’s leeway and autonomy in specifying systems modeling software compared with enterprise-standard CAD/PLM tools
• Systems modeling technology advances anticipated by practitioner advocates
• Improving software integration, interoperability, data interchange
• Improving co-simulation across domain tools
• Better, more complete FMI (Functional Mock-up Interface) implementation/compliance
• Higher-fidelity versions of FMI or similar

The white paper detailing the findings of this research is intended to offer guidance and advice for implementing change, as well as documentation to help convince colleagues, management and partners that new ways of working exist, and that the software technologies to support and enable them are available, accessible, and delivering payback and business advantage to forward-thinking engineering organizations today.

My hope is that this research finds utility as a practical, actionable aid for engineers and engineering management in helping their organizations to adopt and implement—or to strengthen and deepen—a simulation-led, systems-driven approach to product development.

You can download the full white paper reporting our findings here.

Bruce Jenkins, Ora Research
oraresearch.com

Bruce Jenkins is President of Ora Research, an engineering research and advisory service. Maplesoft commissioned him to examine how systems-driven engineering practices are being integrated into the early stages of product development, the results of which are available in a free whitepaper entitled System-Level Physical Modeling and Simulation. In this series of blog posts, Mr. Jenkins discusses the results of his research.

This is the second entry in the series.

My last post, Strategies for accelerating the move to simulation-led, systems-driven engineering, described my firm’s research project to investigate the contemporary state of adoption and application of systems modeling software technologies, and their attendant methods and work processes, in the engineering design of off-highway equipment and mining machinery.

Adoption drivers

In this project, I conducted in-depth, structured but open-ended interviews with some half-dozen expert practitioners at leading manufacturers, including both engineering management and senior discipline leads. These interviews identified the following key technological factors as well as business and competitive issues driving adoption and use of systems modeling tools and methods at current levels:

• Fuel economy and emissions mandates, powertrain electrification and autonomous operation requirements
• Software’s ability to drive down product cost of ownership and delivery times
• Traditional development processes often fail to surface system-level issues until fabrication or assembly, or even until operational deployment
• Detailed analysis tools such as FEA and CFD focus on behaviors at the component level, and are not optimal for studies of the complete system
• Engineering departments/groups enjoy greater freedom in systems modeling software selection and purchase decisions than in enterprise-controlled CAD/PDM/PLM decisions
• Good C/VP-level visibility of systems modeling tools, especially in off-highway equipment

Adoption constraints

At the same time, there was widespread agreement among all the experts interviewed that these tools and methods are not being brought to bear with anywhere near the breadth or depth that practitioner advocates would like, and that they believe would be greatly beneficial to their organizations and industries.

In probing why this is, the interviews revealed an array of factors constraining broader adoption at present. These range from legacy engineering culture issues, through human resource limitations and constraints imposed by business models and corporate cultures, to entrenched shortcomings in how long-established systems modeling software toolsets have been deployed and applied to the product development process:

• Legacy engineering culture constraints
• Conservatism of mining machinery product development culture
• Engineering practices in long-standardized industries grounded in handbook formulas and rules of thumb
• Perceived lack of time in schedule to do systems modeling
• Human resource constraints
• Low availability of engineers with systems modeling skills
• Shortage of engineers trained in systems thinking
• Legacy engineering processes compound shortage of systems-thinking engineers
• Industry downturns put constraints on professional staff development
• Business-model and corporate-culture constraints
• Culture of seeking to mitigate cost and risk by staying with legacy designs instead of advancing and innovating the product
• Corporate awareness of need to innovate in mining machinery gets stifled at engineering level
• Low C/VP-level visibility of systems modeling tools in mining machinery
• Engineering organization constraints on innovating/modernizing their systems modeling technology infrastructure
• Power users wedded to legacy systems modeling tools
• Weak integration at many/most points of the engineering digital toolset chain
• Implementing systems modeling software as a sales configuration/costing aid seen as taking too much time

My next post will detail practitioners’ visions, strategies and best practices for accelerating and institutionalizing the implementation and usage of systems modeling tools and practices in their organizations.

You can download the full white paper reporting our findings here.

Bruce Jenkins, Ora Research
oraresearch.com

Bruce Jenkins is President of Ora Research, an engineering research and advisory service. Maplesoft commissioned him to examine how systems-driven engineering practices are being integrated into the early stages of product development, the results of which are available in a free whitepaper entitled System-Level Physical Modeling and Simulation. In the coming weeks, Mr. Jenkins will discuss the results of his research in a series of blog posts.

This is the first entry in the series.

Discussions of how to bring simulation to bear starting in the early stages of product development have become commonplace today. Driving these discussions, I believe, is growing recognition that engineering design in general, and conceptual and preliminary engineering in particular, face unprecedented pressures to move beyond the intuition-based, guess-and-correct methods that have long dominated product development practices in discrete manufacturing. To continue meeting their enterprises’ strategic business imperatives, engineering organizations must move more deeply into applying all the capabilities for systematic, rational, rapid design development, exploration and optimization available from today’s simulation software technologies.

Unfortunately, discussions of how to simulate early still fixate all too often on 3D CAE methods such as finite element analysis and computational fluid dynamics. This reveals a widespread dearth of awareness and understanding—compounded by some fear, intimidation and avoidance—of system-level physical modeling and simulation software. This technology empowers engineers and engineering teams to begin studying, exploring and optimizing designs in the beginning stages of projects—when product geometry is seldom available for 3D CAE, but when informed engineering decision-making can have its strongest impact and leverage on product development outcomes. Then, properly applied, systems modeling tools can help engineering teams maintain visibility and control at the subsystems, systems and whole-product levels as the design evolves through development, integration, optimization and validation.

As part of my ongoing research and reporting intended to help remedy the low awareness and substantial under-utilization of system-level physical modeling software in too many manufacturing industries today, earlier this year I produced a white paper, “System-Level Physical Modeling and Simulation: Strategies for Accelerating the Move to Simulation-Led, Systems-Driven Engineering in Off-Highway Equipment and Mining Machinery.” The project that resulted in this white paper originated during a technology briefing I received in late 2015 from Maplesoft. The company had noticed my commentary in industry and trade publications expressing the views set out above, and approached me to explore what they saw as shared perspectives.

From these discussions, I proposed that Maplesoft commission me to further investigate these issues through primary research among expert practitioners and engineering management, with emphasis on the off-highway equipment and mining machinery industries. In this research, focused not on software-brand-specific factors but instead on industry-wide issues, I interviewed users of a broad range of systems modeling software products including Dassault Systèmes’ Dymola, Maplesoft’s MapleSim, The MathWorks’ Simulink, Siemens PLM’s LMS Imagine.Lab Amesim, and the Modelica tools and libraries from various providers. Interviewees were drawn from manufacturers of off-highway equipment and mining machinery as well as some makers of materials handling machinery.

At the outset, I worked with Maplesoft to define the project methodology. My firm, Ora Research, then executed the interviews, analyzed the findings and developed the white paper independently of input from Maplesoft. That said, I believe the findings of this project strongly support and validate Maplesoft’s vision and strategy for what it calls model-driven innovation. You can download the white paper here.

Bruce Jenkins, Ora Research
oraresearch.com

Hi,

I am unable to see length of rigid body frame in MapleSim Examples - Physical Domain  - Multibody - 5 DOF robot? Is there a way to see them?

Thanks

Onder

If you try and scroll a page up or down, it just selects the content.  How hard would it be to fix this?

I modelled a telecamera and line follower sensors in Maple in order to calculate the "error" for my PID controller. Know i would like to share this information with the PID in MapleSim but I have no idea how to do it. Is there a way to import maple libraries into MapleSim?

Thanks!

Hi,

I am trying to download some MapleSim Robotic models from the Maplesoft website but I have 'Invalid File Format' error. Could you help please?

Best

Onder

Dear forum users/ admins, I have some questions regarding the wind turbine vibrations model based on the MapleSim gallery. I am a new user, went through some tutorials and am currently trying to understand how the system works.

I will try to deliver my questions based on the pictures shown below:

 1. After running the model, 2 results were shown. One is "Latest Results" and the other is "zeta=0.01". Based on the images above, there is a comment that the result was dated Feb 14 2013. Is this the result on which the day the model was created? If it is, is it programmed to be in the result file everytime the simulation runs?

2. If I untick "zeta=0.01", a red graph appears, which says Latest Result. But the graphs are not labelled. How can I label this graph in MapleSim? 

3. I would also like to ask, what type of vibrations are occuring in the model, and what does the Deflection-Time graph means. Why does the deflection occur highest at 120s and then drops? Is it because the tower becomes stabilized after a while?

4. I understand that the model is run by a signal and fed into a speed component. May I know what is the f(critical) is, and how it affects the system?

5. From the Ramp signal, there is a "height" value. The pre-set value is 10. After changing this value, to lets say 50, the maximum deflections occur at a an earlier time as shown in the figure below:

6. I would like to understand how does the ramp affect the maximum deflection time that occurs.

Thank you very much!

I have created a model for a robot in Solidworks and have imported it into Maplesim using the CAD toolbox. The problem I have is that the robot has 3 arms that are supposed to come together on a central piece pictured below in figure 1, but attempting to simulate the model with all arms connected with a revolute joint as in figure 2 yields an error that says "The system is underdetermined" the location of the error is main.

For the purposes of the image below I only connected one of the arms, this allows Maplesim to run the file successfully.

figure 1 showing the central piece that the 3 arms are supposed to connect to.

Figure 2 showing the problem revolute joints circled in black, the error at the bottom and the setting of the revolute joint on the right.

Essentially my question is how do I get the model to work? I apologise if this problem is not terribly well demonstrated, this is my first post onto this forum so I am not sure of all the standards.

Dear MapleSoft,

Would it be possible you once design a MapleSim webinar for users with more emphasis on Modelica (language, examples, etc.), on how to build more complex custom components, not just a simple DC motor? I think this would be very useful and could extend / enhance the use of MapleSime even more.

Tx in advance,

best regards

Andras

you write:

On maplesim how plot the transfer funtion vs frequency for the public domain example tuned mass dumper?

I am working on modelling a helicopter blade. Maplesim's Flexible Beam model cannot handle composite material cross section and pre-twist angle. I need to build a custom component based on Hodges's beam model. When I use the Custom Component template, add port and choose port type, there is no "frame" type, which is needed to connect other multibody components. Is it possible to create custom multibody component? If so, how can I make it? Thanks! 

Hi, I am a student and a recent new MapleSim user. I downloaded the MapleSim Wind Turbine Vibrations model from the Model Gallery (http://www.maplesoft.com/products/maplesim/modelgallery/detail.aspx?id=162). 

I do not understand the model diagram, and find it difficult to visualize the way all the components work. Also, how can I change the mass moment of inertia of each blade? 

This is my first question, apologies if it sounds silly. Thank you :)

where i can found oscilloscope icon for cisuit simulation?thanks