Rudolf Blaim
Department Manager Requirement Management and Verification in Process IT Idea to Offer
BMW Group

"Virtualization: BMW’s Way to Address Today’s Automotive Challenges"

Five years ago, BMW decided on a paradigm shift to shorten development time and improve the match between requirement and result: predictive simulation for virtual product development. Early concept decisions and the verification of design solutions would be based on the results of numerical simulations, thus keeping the number of hardware prototypes at a minimum. Establishing Abaqus for all crash and occupant simulations was an important decision made in 2003. During these years of close collaboration with SIMULIA, huge progress has been made concerning simulation methods and predictive accuracy. As we shift to new technologies, such as electric drive combined with new vehicle architectures built on carbon-fiber-reinforced polymers (CFRP), we face new challenges. Virtualization to address the 2013 automotive challenges – regardless of whether they are technological, environmental or economical ones – is BMW’s answer.

David Smith
Principal Design Engineer
Ethicon Surgical Care, Inc., a Johnson & Johnson company

"Tackling the Design Challenges of the Healthcare Industry Using Realistic Simulation"

Caring for the world one person at a time inspires and unites the people of Johnson & Johnson. We embrace research and science, bringing innovative ideas, products, and services to advance the health and well-being of over one billion people every day throughout the world. The signature challenge in developing healthcare products, from consumer products to medical devices, is that they must intimately interface with the human body. A subject that poses more difficult geometry capture, property characterization and quantification, and variation than the human body is difficult to find. As we strive to meet the complex and challenging landscape of our customers’ healthcare needs, the robust, powerful, and customizable tools of the SIMULIA suite of products are a key part of our design arsenal.