Two parallel events to weigh up CAE and Virtual Prototyping - Venice - October 2008

"Simulation Based Engineering and Sciences" and " CAE Technologies for Industry": in the same location, on the same dates, two conferences to allow an exhaustive update on technologies and applications able to meet all users' needs. It's time to register!

The international conferences organized by the TCN Consortium can be considered a traditional and important point of reference for all the people involved in CAE or Virtual Prototyping, also for the unique perspective they offer: to favour an industrial-oriented approach, focusing on technological transfer and expertise improvement and development. This year's conference on "Simulation Based Engineering and Sciences" will reaffirm such well-established reputation.

EnginSoft conferences, on the other hand, have marked, since 1994, an annual appointment, so to provide all participants with a unique occasion to debate on a wide range of software technologies, through users' voices and taking advantage of experts' knowledge. The objective is to reflect on the possible design process innovation, to be reached in the most different industrial sectors, and on the software development, with reference to both scientific knowledge and methods evolution and market strategies of technology producers. This year's event on "CAE Technologies for Industry" underlines the main EnginSoft objective.

These two conferences will this year take place on the same days and in a common location, so to allow participants in one event to attend also the other one sessions and vice-versa, giving a unique and outstanding occasion, that is to create and choose an personal "route" though knowledge, benefiting of this purposely planned time-place coincidence.

Furthermore, the two congress areas are linked together by an exhibition hall - for hardware and software technologies producers, associations and organization fostering this sector's expertise - and by a large poster session to present interesting industrial applications and research activities.

CAE and Virtual Prototyping will provide the starting point to reflect on roles, tools and places for innovation, giving a programmatic contribution to the debate on present and future perspectives and with a particular focus on design process innovation. The idea is to outline the state of the art of the different industrial sectors, paying specific attention to the position and role of new technologies in the development processes, using "success stories" as relevant examples and considering the importance of the "human element". This approach aims at equally presenting technology application and efficiency, on one hand, and management challenges, on the other, in terms of their integration in the design process, of suitable approaches for technological transfer to industry, of adequate infrastructures and new professional profiles.

The different contributions have been organized considering both transversal topics (such as materials, medical applications and optimization) and specific industrial sectors.

Just to provide further details, as far as materials are concerned, it's of great importance to underline the role of simulation to identify new materials and their possible applications; the use of multi-scale models is transforming science and development technologies. The basis for material behaviour simulations covers all physical sciences; multi-scale models are quantifiable and therefore empirical assumptions can be replaced by physical descriptions; phenomena can be presented underlining specific aspects, as it couldn't be done using any other experimental observation system.

With regard to medicine, simulation can dramatically increase the comprehension of most diseases (cardiac, respiratory, neoplastic) and their treatments (surgery, catheter, pharmacological), since they imply complex physical reactions and interactions among biological systems, from a molecular level to an organism scale. Great steps forward have already been taken in several sectors, such as genomics and proteomics. Today's challenge is the application to clinical medicine and to biological systems study on different scales (cellular, tissue, organism).

Optimization is today a very common topic at every level. The conference aims at outlining its state of the art and to envisage its evolution: do we have today software technologies able to really deal with complex systems integration from a multi-objective optimization and robust design point of view? If yes, with which limits and prospects?

With reference to industrial applications, separate sessions have been planned for the following sectors: automotive, aerospace, power energy, process & manufacturing. Each one of them is characterized by specific problems, but they can be analyzed with similar approaches both conceptually and methodologically, following, for example the sequence of test, validation and uncertainty quantification. How can it be possible to make a decision, with no idea of the simulation reliability? Important steps forward have been taken also in this context, thus dealing with an area that can be hardly defined. It is therefore interesting to understand which are the criteria and metrics for validation and how the impact, of both objective and subjective uncertainty, can be limited.

Another common aspect to all sectors can be detected in the so called "dynamic data-driven application systems", which means systems able to include forms of control with symbiotic feedback, in real time, between virtual prototyping and acquired data. The development of this revolutionary discipline has just started, but it is easy to guess its important effects in terms of reliability of virtual prototyping in the design and productive processes and of its overall efficiency.

The data management and visualization constitutes a relevant topic for all industrial sectors, not just with reference to the problem size and growth but considering probabilistic approaches: the data quantity is in this cases several orders of magnitude higher than for deterministic approaches. The same is for real time interaction with databases and data acquisition systems. Their visualization is more and more the key for a correct results reading and interpretation. It's not enough to solve the problem of the graphic management of huge models, but it's necessary to find also suitable visualization systems to represent uncertainty and error and to dynamically manage such information.

It's also important to remind how new algorithms are necessary to effectively transpose mathematic processes into numerical processes. This element is strictly related to the increase in hardware processing speed, requiring software houses not only to take such aspect into account, but also to provide (and not just promise) adequate solutions.

The most critical point, in the all process of CAE design approach implementation, is the knowledge role and it will be largely debated in the conference. The knowledge background, which is necessary to improve in the computer simulation use, is becoming wider and wider, with no limits marked by disciplines, as on the contrary happens in a traditional academic context. The idea of changing the University educational system is quite utopian, reason for which organizations like TCN Consortium, or EnginSoft itself, can play an important role and provide a relevant contribution to on-going training and technology transfer.

This overall perspective is to say that these two parallel events cannot be missed. In the over 200 contributions presented by renowned speakers representing the industrial, academic and research worlds, and in the suggestions and information coming from the technology producers, it will be probably possible to envisage the right answers to specific requirements and expectations coming from the everyday work, interesting ideas to better orient companies' activities and decisions, searching for a combination of shot and long-term innovation, concreteness and feasibility, aware of what is new and stands out strongly.