Editor's Pick: Using OntoSpace v3.0 to Avoid Design Complexity

By Anthony J. Lockwood

Dear Desktop Engineering Reader:

We’re having a record year for snow in New Hampshire, and my new snowblower is driving me nuts. The casing covering the mechanism that rotates the throw chute is vulnerable to snow blowing up and back into it, such as you might encounter should you be shooting snow and advancing simultaneously. So, it freezes in one position like a broken rudder, forcing me to clear my driveway at odd, time-consuming angles to minimize piling snow where I have yet to clear.

I guess that the designers modeled the mechanism under ideal circumstances without accounting for its behavior in realistic environmental conditions. Snow blowing up and into the casing forming a block of ice presented multiphysics phenomena of such complexity that they were ignored as outliers. Thus, they verified the mechanism worked, but they did not validate that their mechanism worked in the real world. This is a failure of complexity management. OntoSpace from Ontonix could have helped them build a better product.

How OntoSpace works: You feed it the data from, say, your simulation. It then generates maps illustrating the possible behaviors of your system over its operational range. From there, you can easily see the interrelationships of parts, quantify system fragility or robustness, and identify then analyze outliers that make a system vulnerable to failure and thus puts your business at risk from cranky customers blogging that your %#$%@ snowblower is not worth the dinero because the mechanism that controls its main function tends to freeze when used in snow.

The real power of OntoSpace is that it exposes the hidden details about your complex system so that you can make informed decisions that mitigate your system’s weaknesses, which helps you control costs, improve time to market, and all that neat stuff. The real beauty of OntoSpace is that you do not have to be a stochastic savant to use it.

As our systems and world get more and more complex, the more vulnerable our systems and world become to their obscure weak links, our erroneous assumptions, and our good old-fashioned oversights. Or as the old proverb goes, “for want of a nail the kingdom was lost.” OntoSpace complexity management software can help you find that nail before its absence starts a cascade of failures that cause your part, process, or system to crash.

Check out OntoSpace v3 from today’s Pick of the Week write-up. From the write-up, hit the link and sign up for a trial of the online version. The pitch is toward the business folk, but data is data. OntoSpace can handle your stuff. Give it a whirl.

Thanks, Pal.

Anthony J. Lockwood
Editor at Large, Desktop Engineering Magazine