upsim-project: Unleash Potentials in Simulation
General Overview
Most major industrial organizations employ numerical simulation in support of their engineering and business decision-making, where simulation is mainly intended to be applied for reducing efforts along the overall product lifecycle, within product development, its production and during operation. This indicates, that simply using numerical simulation for development, production and operation along the product lifecycle is no longer an essential and competitive differentiator between companies and industries. Furthermore, as Modelling & Simulation goes in parallel to real testing for final approval, real testing of currently envisioned smart systems will be temporally, practically and economically impossible. UPSIM addresses the fundamental problem of Modelling & Simulation credibility for unleashing the hidden potentials in simulation.
Digital Twin is one of the emerging technologies in discussion in almost all industrial sectors directly refers to the physical asset and allows it to be simulated, controlled and improved. A recent market study outlines that less than 1 % of physical machines and components “are modelled such that the models capture and mimic behaviour” today! UPSIM is aiming for Credible Digital Twins and will change this situation significantly with predictive capabilities, leading to an opening and the accessibility of multi-billion markets prospected like for virtual commissioning and predictive maintenance.
UPSIM addresses the problem by the introduction of four major innovations based on the concept of Simulation Governance:
The main project outcomes shall be made available via open access and an open source repository, for ensuring technology sustainability, a broad market-uptake and a long-term economical added value.
Proposed innovations will engage additional value streams and the emergence of new business models. The provision of credible and uniquely identified Simulation Apps via domain-specific marketplaces is instrumental to massive exploitation, as efficiency and speed of using Simulation is perhaps the primary factor impacting how frequently and widely simulation is conducted – Simulation Apps will definitely allow a much broader audience of non-specialists and occasional users to safely benefit from simulation.
UPSIM represents a Pan-European innovation action and the involvement of projects partners from seven countries, resulting from the effective interlinkage of several technology-specific hotspots within Europe. The consortium is complemented by scientific key persons, links to relevant standardization bodies and local industrial clusters for ensuring a smooth innovation provision and a rapid market-uptake as well. UPSIM partners covers complete value-chains within agriculture, healthcare, automotive and smart building domains for implementing UPSIM results in a multi-disciplinary and multi-domain fashion.
Key Elements for Credible Digital Twins
For providing Credible Digital Twins, the UPSIM Project proposes a three-layered solution approach for ensuring credibility and trust in system modelling and simulation for unleashing broad scale economic value.
Modelling and Simulation is mainly practiced in parallel to real testing and preliminary represents a sort of support action, where the ‘high priests’ of simulation are ‘owning’ the dedicated models and simulations. UPSIM is following the concept of Simulation Governance and extends its approach for Credible Digital Twins. This goes in-line with the continuous determination and monitoring of the Modelling & Simulation quality from ‘function-to-simulation’ and therefore a generic Digital Twin Readiness Level will be defined. As Simulation Governance has to be implemented individually for each kind of products, UPSIMs aim is to provide reference processes (a kind of best practices) and an according process assessment model for evaluation of company specific process implementation, including capability levels. This approach ensures a quality assurance for Digital Twins along the product lifecycle and goes in-line with currently available and industrial accepted approaches, like e.g. ASPICE for development of automotive embedded software.
Modern and smart products are typically created by aggregation of subsystems cooperating so that the system is able to deliver the overarching functionality. Typically, the OEM is responsible for the integration task, where the subsystems or components are delivered by 3rd parties or suppliers. For enabling a collaborative development of Credible Digital Twins, UPSIM is extending the reference processes defined in Solution Layer 1 by collaboration processes (patterns) for ensuring a continuous monitoring of the distributed simulation artefact developments. For traceability, documentation and ensuring the overarching functionality model-based system development approaches are used and introduced for Modelling & Simulation. Furthermore, industrial-proven approaches (Continuous Integration) from agile software development will be utilized for supporting a high level of automation and test-driven development of Credible Digital Twins, providing a solid infrastructure for versioning, testing, reporting and a continuous maturity evaluation via the defined Digital Twin Readiness Level. Continuous Integration is also identified as the most promising concept for incorporation of suppliers within development.
Confidence in simulation artefacts is usually quite low in practice. UPSIM addresses this problem by introducing the Solution Layers 1 and 2 for arguing and verifying Digital Twins credibility. In the event of achieving the requested level of its Digital Twin maturity, based on the Digital Twin Readiness Level introduced, the related simulation artefacts have to be uniquely identified. The concept of a ‘digital signature’ for simulation artefacts is identified as a reasonable solution. As different stakeholders are providing dedicated (pieces) artefacts and the artefacts depends on each other, a chained way of unique identification is introduced. Therefore, UPSIMs Solution Layer 3 covers the elaboration of the ‘chained digital signature’ concept and the realization of a block-chain based Distributed Public Key Infrastructure for handling Credible Digital Twins. This unique identification of the simulation artefacts corresponding to the different maturity levels of Credible Digital Twins over product lifecycle will also engage a confident usage of simulations from 3rd parties, enabling the concept of Credible Simulation Applications, briefly spoken credible SimApp’s.
Automotive Use Case: Scenario-based Testing
Testing Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) is challenging, as the environmental conditions that appear in reality are manifold and complex. Testing on the road only is not feasible since it is expensive and difficult to reproduce results – additionally virtual tests based on environment simulations are therefore required.
These simulations are based on scenarios representing real world situations that provide ground truth data to sensors or sensor models for the environmental perception. To integrate environment simulations with function simulations, lists of objects (i.e. sensed and abstracted traffic participants) and sensor raw data need to be exchanged and have to be processed by the ADAS function under test. Various simulators for automated driving exist that provide different, not uniquely defined interfaces.
The challenge lies in the proper integration and configuration of complex tool-chains for scenario-based testing of (partly) automated vehicles.
Healthcare Use Case: Medical Imaging Catheter
Virtual Design and Testing of medical imaging catheters by means of creating interacting device/human Digital Twins. To decrease the time to market for next generation medical devices, product development should be strongly supported by virtual design and testing by means of high-fidelity digital twins of these devices and human tissue (e.g., arteries).
Our improved understanding of the device-human tissue interaction from these interacting digital models will lead to quantified loading conditions within the device, and consequently, to improved performance and reliability.
In addition, we will be able to develop accelerated qualification tests and thus, reduce development cycles and materials usage. The use case will lead to quantification of credibility and accuracy of these interacting digital twins for virtual testing, as well as potential workflow and business value.
Agriculture Use Case: Agriculture Robot
In the process of moving towards autonomous robotic agricultural operations, several tasks rise to ensure continuous product reliability and performance without human interaction during operation. A common challenge when developing agricultural machinery is the ability to comply with the varying physical conditions across Europe, e.g. soil type and texture, topography, etc.
Furthermore, the robots need to be compatible with a wide range of equipment and tools to be an integrated part of future farming. The agricultural robots consist of multiple sensors, software, electronics and mechanics.
Tests is a crucial but time-consuming. By obtaining a validated digital twin of the system, the time to market can be reduced by performing tests in a virtual setting rather than performing physical tests that are often constrained by the availability of a test field, weather conditions and fully functional subsystems.
By increasing the physics-based modelling, simulation and digital twin capabilities will provide valuable insights about the overall machine performance in the design phase as well as during field operation.
The pan-European ITEA3 Project UPSIM aims for Unleashing Potentials in Simulation by introducing quality management to modelling and simulation.
Credible Digital Twins will be the game changer for accelerating innovation and reducing development costs in different industries. UPSIM will boost virtual system development and will introduce collaboration processes that will ensure data availability in distributed development environments.
Broad automation via continuous testing and AI supported simulation is focused in the combination with blockchain-based traceability and quality measures, which finally leads to credible Digital Twins for various applications – from smart engineering, virtual commissioning to predictive maintenance in system operation.