CAE Process Improvement Based on Knowledge Management and Task Automation

Nowadays, the effort to create a complex finite element model has been increasing rapidly and developments times have been trimmed in order to put more products into market in less time. There are several solutions to this situation; one of them is to increase the CAE resources around the work, another solution is to manage the knowledge of CAE specialist and automate recurring tasks to free the knowledge worker from this activities and focus on the task that add value to the activities. There are several benefits of automating task and knowledge management over increasing head-count: Fixed cost does not increase, knowledge is kept inside the corporation and engineers focus to solve problems and not in building CAE models.

This paper will demonstrate how can the experienced CAE specialist could improve the efficiency of the his/her process by transforming the way of creating the finite element models. Instead of investing time and effort driving a meshing application, the specialist will transform the knowledge in regards of the procedures to create a finite element mesh into custom build applications using VBA and Tcl/Tk[1]. The CAE specialist will focus on solving problems and not in creating the finite element models.

In a near future, there will be a change in the CAE Process; the required effort that the specialist will allocate to build a finite element model will be decreased to a point that he/she will just be managing the information generated by servers running commercial or custom-build application.