Editor's Pick: Noesis and Maplesoft in Design Optimization Partnership

By Anthony J. Lockwood

Dear Desktop Engineering Reader:

I do not like live chickens. See, if you ask me to tend yours, they’ll surely lose their solidity to a hungry fox. I do, however, respect chickens for their ceaseless burbling as they hunt and peck for a bit of chow. It seems a metaphor for so much of life. Take design optimization. You run a design through a bunch of simulation tools then you hunt and peck your way through your results to discover an optimized design while muttering to yourself that there has to be a better way. There could be. Read on.

Noesis Solutions has this system called OPTIMUS that brings together your various design optimization tools into an integrated workflow. What you’re talking about with OPTIMUS is a system for design exploration and optimization, robustness and reliability, process integration, and even data mining. It seems to have everything from Paretos to DOEs to response surface models to that Taguchi stuff that, um, I never quite got into my head.

A neatness of OPTIMUS I learned of is that it automates robustness assessments. Its optimization algorithms are intended to lead your simulation to the most promising designs. And since OPTIMUS lets you combine into its assessments product attributes that have been evaluated with unrelated simulation systems, it should be a robust robustness assessment. Ultimately, what you end up with are a few possible design candidates that you can then beat on and validate in detail. And you also should end up with a lot of saved development time and costs because your manual, hunt-and-peck assessments are eliminated.

OPTIMUS has interfaces to all sorts of analysis environments, including Abaqus, ANSYS WorkBench, CATIA-V5, LMS Virtual.Lab, and MATLAB. The company has just announced its newest design optimization partnership: direct interfaces with Maplesoft’s Maple technical computing and documentation environment as well as the MapleSim multidomain physical modeling environment. These combinations should give you very high-level techniques for parameter optimization studies in highly complex engineering processes. In the end, that means you’ll be designing better products.

You can learn more about the OPTIMUS and Maple/Maplesoft interfaces from today’s Pick of the Week write-up. But a paltry message and new product write-up from a cluck like me does not begin to scratch the surface of what OPTIMUS can do for you. Peck at one of the links at the end of the write-up and spend some time discovering this discovery system. It seems to me that the saving potential here is anything but chicken feed.

Thanks, Pal. — Lockwood

Anthony J. Lockwood
Editor at Large, Desktop Engineering

Read today's pick of the week write-up.

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