Products

MBSE driven by AI – shake that design fixation!

By Alex Graham

If you have ever grappled with an engineering challenge (or a difficult jigsaw) then you’ll know that sometimes it is best to stop staring at it and take a break. Go for a walk, or a sleep, and come back to it later. With luck, you might find a new perspective.

Even better is to get a fresh pair of eyes on it. Ideally, ask someone who doesn’t have your prior experience and has not seen your process thus far. That person can often see solutions that had been outside your field of view.

When designing new products, it is impossible not to be influenced by existing designs for similar devices or systems. Our natural tendency is to start from an existing and proven solution. If it can be easily modified to fit our requirements, then why not? This may be a sensible, efficient and low-risk way to go about designing a new product, but how often does it produce something truly innovative?

Think outside the box, I hear you say

The reality is, it is hard to always ‘think outside the box’. Our deadlines and workload often just can’t accommodate the thinking time needed. You need that fresh pair of eyes again. Someone who really understands the requirements and how to build a system to meet them, but does not suffer from the tunnel vision that blights us as humans…. But who am I describing?

Enter artificial intelligence (AI) driven model-based systems engineering (MBSE). AI can help you find a truly innovative direction at the very earliest stages of your design cycle. In other words – get that fresh pair of eyes on your problem.

Transform your MBSE process with artificial intelligence

Simcenter Studio is a new MBSE tool from Siemens Digital Industries Software. Starting from a set of requirements and constraints, it makes extensive use of artificial intelligence to generate candidate designs and guides you towards the most promising options to take forward.

This technology could change everything – to find out more, check out this “Designing the Future” interview on engineering.com with our very own Mike Nicolai, product manager for Simcenter Studio.

And before anyone points it out, I know generative engineering and MBSE wouldn’t help to complete a jigsaw!

Learn more

If you would like to hear more about how system simulation fits into the context of MBSE in the Siemens Xcelerator Portfolio, from architecting and authoring to model management and deployment, check out this blog.

Simcenter Studio was launched as part of Simcenter system simulation 2021.1 in June this year. Check out the virtual launch in case you missed it.

This article first appeared on the Siemens Digital Industries Software blog at https://blogs.sw.siemens.com/simcenter/shake-that-design-fixation-with-ai-driven-mbse-simcenter/