ANSYS improves its SCADE system

By Niraj M Wanikar, Chief Editor, CNCTimes.com, 2014-07-23 11:14:26

Systems and software engineering teams can drive new levels of collaboration through innovative information exchange with each other and with third-party data repositories thanks to improvements in the latest release of ANSYS SCADE System.

Efficiently designing complex systems and embedded software applications – which can include sensors, actuators and controllers that run complicated software applications – is a challenge for many organisations due to a lack of efficient collaboration among engineering teams and databases. The newly released SCADE System 15.2 from ANSYS solves these challenges by providing new, unique capabilities and enhancements that offer the most advanced approach to guide complex systems engineering designs.

Release 15.2 extends the SCADE System solution through unlimited component reuse as well as comprehensive data management for exchanging data with third-party databases and propagating this data within the systems architecture design. The solution also features a new SCADE System configurator tool to customise the solutions for specific domains, in addition to such standard domains as IMA and AUTOSAR.

"Lack of internal collaboration has been a major impediment in product development," said Mr Eric Bantegnie, ANSYS vice president. "This latest release of SCADE System helps to remove this barrier by enabling teams to share data effortlessly – furthering our vision for Simulation Driven Product Development," he adds.

Highlights of the release include:

Hierarchy management: Systems engineers need to reuse components, which may contain sub-components, as well as specify different information for individual instances of the same component. This requires consistently managed replicas of the components' internal definition. Traditional tools do not provide that capability and instead require engineers to manually copy and paste definitions and resolve inconsistencies when changes are made. SCADE now enables systems engineers to manage the entire hierarchy of instances in a user-friendly environment, automatically preserving the consistency of the replicated data. As a result, engineers save considerable time and reduce the risk of introducing errors into the models.

Data sharing and reuse: Systems engineers need to manage and produce Interface Control Documents (ICDs), which are detailed specifications of all of the interfaces between subsystems and the system with external forces. Managing this large set of information is a complicated task, as the data may have been defined prior to the design of the system architecture itself. With SCADE System 15.2, systems engineers can save time by importing and exporting data dictionaries, allocating data to the architecture and propagating them along the communication paths. Model-based ICDs can be defined at all levels within the system architecture, including functions, architecture item and equipment. The ICDs are supported by customizable tables in each block. They include the list of data produced and consumed, along with data properties, source and target of the data and any information extracted from the model by customizable scripts.

Automated configuration: SCADE System includes new configuration technology, enabling tools and methods teams to easily customise the solution for customer-specific domains, as well as standard domains such as IMA and AUTOSAR. The configuration contains the definition of such domain-specific objects as function, equipment and bus. It also includes domain-specific object properties and constraints among objects. Configuration deployment is fully automated and allows end users to work with a domain-specific modeler with dedicated user interface palettes and property pages. New configuration adoption is increased because this environment is familiar to the end users.

SCADE System provides a comprehensive environment and user-friendly interface that simplifies systems engineering tasks that are otherwise complex to handle: consistent replication of reused components in a system architecture, propagation within the architecture of data imported from pre-existing databases and generation of up-to-date and consistent ICDs. With the configurator module, end user tasks are made even easier with interfaces that exactly match the user's domain.

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