Modular collaborative simulation in multibody system dynamics of complex mechatronic products

Multidisciplinary collaborative simulation is a new paradigm to enhance the analysis of complex engineering systems more accurately in the systematic level, which enabling the interaction of subsystems models constructed by different CAE software tools in a time-synchronized and high fidelity way. This paper presents a modular method to implement the multidisciplinary collaborative simulation for complex engineering systems in a distributed environment. The modular decomposition is based on the configured subsystems in engineering intuition of corresponding disciplines. The global system is described by inter-connections between subsystems with block representation, thus the different simulation modules are interrelated with the corresponding inputs and outputs. The modular simulation approach allows for independent and parallel modeling of each subsystem and has the advantages of a better modularity. A component-based infrastructure is proposed to integrate the distributed, heterogeneous CAE tools. A modular simulation system which can support the integration of distributed simulation models at run-time is developed, involving the implementation technologies of interrelated modules, disciplinary model transformation and simulation time advancement. Modular modeling and simulation of a rolling stock is demonstrated as a typical case study. Numerical results of the modular simulation demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach to multidisciplinary collaborative simulations for complex engineering systems.