Active Support Systems for Integrated Rapid Prototyping

Rapid Prototyping plays a key role in reducing the time-to-market by allowing limited numbers of new products to be designed and built quickly. To achieve higher productivity and optimal design in mechanical engineering and manufacturing, the numerical simulation concept has to be combined with an efficient, user friendly, multi-physical integrated development environment, capable of maximizing or minimizing any measure of the target system performance while satisfying a wide variety of design constraints: an Active Support System. In the case of finite computational resource systems, it is necessary to choose the best compromise in allocating the computational load for each physical domain according to the available global computational resources, in order to avoid a severe degradation of the overall required accuracy for the final global solution. The present contribution describes the main development considerations of Subsystem Granularity Concise Descriptors for Active Support Systems. An example of their use for Multi-Physical Virtual Prototyping, with autonomous decision capability on computational load optimization, is shown.