Each new car design requires roughly £0.5 million worth of physical prototypes, and automakers build many of them before a vehicle reaches production. This project aims to slash that number by making computer simulation so reliable that most crash tests and other design evaluations can happen virtually instead of in a workshop. The problem is that running more simulations creates a computational bottleneck. As engineers add layers of virtual testing, the system becomes complex, data gets misinterpreted, and decisions slow down. This research tackles those inefficiencies head-on. The team will write software that speeds up individual simulation tasks, automatically logs every piece of data so it cannot be misread or lost, and models the entire design workflow to spot and resolve conflicts before they cause delays. If successful, the work could push the automotive industry toward "virtual vehicle design"—where a car is fully tested and refined on a computer before any metal is cut. That would cut development costs dramatically and shorten the time it takes to bring safer, more efficient vehicles to market. The same approach could also apply to aerospace, construction, or any industry that relies on expensive physical prototypes.
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It costs roughly £0.5 million to build a prototype of a car. Many prototypes need to be constructed during the process of designing a new vehicle and also when developing a new version of an existing vehicle. Clearly, anything that can reduce the number of prototypes needed will have a significant impact on the cost of automobile design. Simulation is already used extensively in the automotive industry. For instance, assessing car crash worthiness during the design process is now entirely performed computationally. The aim of the Programme for Simulation Innovation is to increase the use of simulation in car design. Indeed it can be seen as a further significant step towards the goal of 'virtual vehicle design' where the entire design process is carried out on the computer. However, increasing the amount of simulation used in the design process will significantly increase the demands on the computational ecosystem and, perhaps more seriously, introduce many layers of complexity which could lead to inefficient use of the computational ecosystem and poor decision making. Our work is targeted at addressing these potential problems by increasing the efficiency of individual computational tasks, automatically documenting simulation data to avoid misintepretation, allow data re-use and enable automated data archiving protocols and, finally, modelling the complexity of the virtual vehicle design task and, based on this, implementing rules to resolve conflicts in the computational and data flows and in the decision stages of the design process.
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