Digitalization of Mechanical Labs for Enhanced Traceability and Virtual Verification

Digitalization is the process of leveraging digital technologies to transform business operations, processes, and models, enabling organizations to improve efficiency, create new value, and enhance customer experiences. It is essential as it enables data-driven decisions and reduces product development time. It’s easier to Digitalize new products however, transforming existing products and processes is a challenging task, as constituents are in various phases of lifecycle. Also, the existing/ legacy data acts as a starting point for future programs. Currently, teams are spending hours to weeks finding the right processes and data, costing $~14,000 per test based on labor hours. To tackle this challenge, Mechanical labs are digitalizing their data and processes alongside physical tests via 3DEXPERIENCE application to capture data in digital models and ensure traceability for which Requirement Functional Logical Physical (RFLP) framework is leveraged. This traces Requirements to its functional elements that are allocated to the logical elements forming a basis for behavior analysis. Further integrating the physical entities (Virtual product/s) to RFL enables realistic simulation capability. This framework has been implemented on some structural tests involved in the development of composite material for future. Results show a clear traceability between requirements and their chain of elements, estimated to reduced 2 hours of search efforts into 15 minutes. Now teams spend more time on analysis of required systems. The realistic simulation capability was used to verify a step in the test machine configuration, thereby saving time to verify during test execution and paving way for virtual verification of requirements.