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Automotive OEMS are continuously working on improvements of their vehicle development processes, to improve quality, reduce lead time and cost. In particular the enhancement of virtual methods is crucial for manufacturing engineering to enable the elimination of physical prototype builds and thus to reduce development cost and time. By analyzing the main issues in reduction of physical builds, compliant parts were identified as being most critical, since their digital representation does not coincide with the reality, so that many changes needed to be made after first hardware validation. As input for compliant part analysis software the material properties have to be specified to allow simplified handling of these parts as homogeneous objects. This is a completely new task for automotive industry, since this data was not needed before and is thus unknown.

The development of virtual techniques becomes more and more important for the automotive industry to allow an acceleration of the vehicle development and the reduction of hardware prototypes. By analyzing the main problem points arising on the first hardware builds it came out, that compliant parts are most critical, since their digital representation does not coincide with the reality, so that many changes are made after first hardware validation. Already some years ago GM has started to work together with the Fraunhofer-Chalmers Centre in Gothenburg, Sweden, on the development of the software Industrial Path Solutions (IPS). At one side the enhancements of the software itself build up the basis for investigations of cables, hoses etc, at the other side in particular for this kind of simulation the industry itself has to invest a lot effort for the effective application of the software. To allow the effective usage of compliant part software load cases were defined.