VE-Suite: A Software Framework for Design-Analysis Integration During Product Realization

Product realization is a complex decision-making process requiring intensive interactions between engineers, especially between designers and analysts. It is necessary to develop effective tools to help them manage the heterogeneous software tools, multidisciplinary engineering models, and information flows during the process. Multidisciplinary analysis results must be synthesized with the design models to support designers making decisions based on an overall understanding about the product’s performance. Meanwhile, along the product realization timeline, these tools, models, and information must be constantly updated and modified. In this paper, we present a flexible software framework, VE-Suite, to handle the “two-dimensional” characteristics of design-analysis integration. The data structure and communication mechanism in VE-Suite enable convenient design-analysis integration not only across the boundary of disciplines, but also along the product realization timeline. An ongoing design scenario of a hydraulic mixing nozzle is presented; some temporary results are introduced to demonstrate the significance of the two-dimensional integration and the effectiveness of the VE-Suite.