ASSESS Congress 2016

The 1st Annual ASSESS Congress was held in January 2016 in Potomac, MD. This congress started where the Summit left off, bringing together the key participants to further review the current status, issues, goals and actionable items of the ASSESS Initiative, but with a deeper and broader pool of the leadership from the community of domain experts, industry analysts, software providers, researchers, and others in the community of model-based analysis, simulation and systems engineering. The role of the ASSESS 2016 congress was to guide and influence software development and strategies to the capture of value of, and to enable, expanding the use and practical scope of software for model-based analysis, simulation and systems engineering. Those who participated in ASSESS 2016 will help shape the industry and product strategies for the next decade.

The demand for software tools for model-based Software Tools for Analysis, Systems Engineering, and Simulation is exploding; at the same time, we are struggling to keep up with our current demand for experts able to effectively use these tools. Today these sophisticated tools are extremely complex and limited to use by highly specialized experts. The actual growth of the usage and benefit of these technologies is directly related to available expertise resulting in an inability to meet the rapidly growing demand. The business drivers for increased competitiveness are going to force a “revolution” to overcome the expertise based limitation to expansion. This is our dilemma: unless we change our approach, how can we come meet the demand for expertise needed to support the coming explosion in demand when we can barely keep up with current demand?

85 participants consisting of a Who's-Who of the simulation software community participated in ASSESS 2016 Congress held in Potomac, MD. The participants explored the 7 key themes for the ASSESS Initiative to establish: current state, Mission/Objectives, obstacles, and next steps.

• 1. Democratization Of Engineering Simulation (DoES)
• 2. Simulation Confidence
• 3. Business Challegnes
• 4. The Intersection of Systems Modeling and Classical Simulation
• 5. Aligning Commercial, Government & Research Interests and Efforts
• 6. Potential Game Changers
• 7. Looking forward

The closing of the ASSESS 2016 Congress was earmarked by a highlighted need to form alliances to develop harmonized visions for engineering simulation across industry, academia, government, professional organizations, and CAx vendors. In order to develop this harmony, each of member needs to implement “win-win” collaborative business scenarios for all facets. By working in tandem, model-based analysis, simulation and systems engineering can focus on developing engineering simulation environments for experiencing real-time multi-physical response simulations. And the ASSESS Initiative community aims to take the challenge of targeting realistic simulation of problems at the speed of human thought.

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(Software Technologies for Analysis, Systems Engineering, and Simulation)
• led by-- Monica Schnitger (Schnitger Corp.) / Karlheinz Peters (intrinSIM)
STASES Confidence
• led by-- Keith Meintjes (CIMdata)
Business Challenges
• led by– Marc Halpern (Gartner)

The Intersection of Systems Modeling and Classical Simulation
• led by– Don Tolle (CIMdata)

Aligning Commercial, Government & Research Interests and Efforts
• led by– Dennis Nagy (BeyondCAE)
Potential Game Changers
• led by– Andreas Vlahinos (AES)
Looking Forward
• led by– Jack Ring (Educe) / Bruce Jenkins (Ora Research)

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Democratizing STASES
Mission
• Make it possible for people who could benefit from using STASES to be able to use STASES
• Get STASES into the hands of current nonusers
• Address STASES’ ease of use issues
• Grow STASES use by 10x in 5 years
Next Steps
Communicate STASES success stories
• Technical successes
• Business successes
Promote the appification of STASES
Consider any other idea to improve STASES ease of use
Investigate real Cost issues
• Licensing is only a small part
• Establish ASSESS Advisory Committee Working Group

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STASES Confidence
Scope
• Appropriate Model Fidelity
• Verification & Validation
• Uncertainty Quantification
• Risk Management
• Deployment & Governance
• The UNSEXY STUFF > Simulation Governance
Simulation Governance
• Simulation Management as a corporate strategic asset
• Command & control of all assets to achieve a goal
• Goal = Business Need = Simulation Governance ROI
• Reduce Cost (ROI)
• Reduce Time
• Increase Quality
• Increase Business Growth
• Reduce Risk
• Increase Innovation
Next Steps
• Compose Industrial CxO Message
• Establish Messengers
• ASSESS & NAFEMS Collaboration
• Publish Examples
• Establish ASSESS Advisory Committee Working Group

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Business Challenges
Key Factors
• Licensing models
• Business impact of web cloud/mobile
• Value proposition of STASES
• Communication with non-technical executives
• Role of untapped SMEs
Recommendations
• Licensing Models
• Promote “pay as you go” and adopt services/vendors that provide “pay as you go” CAE/simulation access
• Web cloud/mobile
• Educate the IT organization and be patient
• Value Proposition
• More aggressive promotion through professional societies & other channels
• Communication with executives
• Expose CAE/simulation value through media that executives prioritize
• Role of SMEs
• Further development and support of standards for data sharing (e.g. FMI)
• Cultivate best practices and use of “certified” consultants
• Guidelines and best practices for contextually rich apps
• Establish ASSESS Advisory Committee Working Group

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Intersection of Systems Engineering & Classical
Mission/Goals/Objectives
• Aspire to find a single, well-integrated approach
• Ease of use
• Good and widely accepted standards
• VV&A, UQ (component-based)
• Libraries of accredited components
Major Issues
• “SILOS”
• Lack of a common understanding that makes it possible to understand different silos from a common point of view
• Insufficient standards for communicating required information between/among silo-specific tools and formalisms
• Existing standardization efforts (e.g. FMI) are good, but very far from complete
• Lack of funding / momentum
Recommendations
• Develop & Evolve Standards
• Evolve existing
• Develop New standards for integrating domain-specific tools and techniques
• Develop candidate reference implementations to test and refine possible standards
• Develop & Evolve Best Practices
• VV&A, UQ – best practices
• Develop libraries of accredited component models
• Establish ASSESS Advisory Committee Working Group

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Aligning Commercial, Government and Research
Issues
• Government
• Huge replication of effort in Commercial and Government
• Research
• No incentive to carry deliverables further
• Commercial Vendors
• Lack of resources and inclination to support Research
• IP issues/models often block alignment
Recommendations
• Get all parties involved early along the chain
• e.g. Pre-competitive consortia
• Inventory current mechanisms for cooperation & study ongoing models
• Establish ASSESS Advisory Committee Working Group

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Potential Game Changers
• Topology Optimization and ALM
• Elimination of CAD
• Design Process Automation that takes the human out of the loop
• Web / Cloud / Mobile
• Gaming Industry product development Model
• Digital Twins
• Model Base System Engineering
• Knowledge Capture and Reuse
• Computer Aided Innovation

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Looking Forward
Vision
• Evolve simulation tools to incorporate knowledge about themselves and their environment
• Improve the economic and educational support infrastructure
Opportunities
• Improve education
• Improve economic model to fund R&D
• Incorporate human knowledge
• Enable systems to be higher-order
• Evolve systems within ethical boundaries
• Improve soundness and completeness of requirements
• Automatically discover when rules are needed for emergent systems