HEEDS software helps you automate and simplify virtual prototyping initiatives by allowing you to:

[icon name="icon-ok"] Create process flows combining internal, commercial 1D, 2D and 3D simulation and cost-estimating tools [/icon]
[icon name="icon-ok"] Modify any native geometry [/icon]
[icon name="icon-ok"] Robustly re-mesh or update any simulation physics models [/icon]
[icon name="icon-ok"] Support co-simulation or sequential workflows [/icon]
[icon name="icon-ok"] Automate model rebuilding to explore a broad design space [/icon]

Automating simulation workflows

Easily connect and interact with many commercial and internal software solutions

By using HEEDS, you can easily define the design workflow and automatically share data between different modeling and simulation products. This leaves you to focus on gaining a deeper understanding of you design and choosing the best option for production.

The process automation capabilities of HEEDS allows users to push a single button and evaluate any design variant. Furthermore, with the workflow fully automated, it allows for downstream design exploration to take place more easily and efficiently.

A typical HEEDS workflow for crash & NVH design exploration

Drag-and-drop tool icons to define the process flow to build your virtual prototype. You can include internal tools or commercial 1D, 2D, and 3D simulation software. The process can be sequential or can include branching and loops. You decide.

Intuitive to Use

Even though the technology driving HEEDS is complex, the software is user-friendly. The unique interface leads you clearly through the five-step process of project setup, execution, and data mining.

[tab_item title="CFD/Thermal"]

CFD computational fluid dynamics and thermal analysis.

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[tab_item title="FEA/Crash/NVH"]

FEA finite element analysis, crash, NVH noise vibration and harshness studies.

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[tab_item title="Motion/1D"]

Multibody simulation and 1D dimensional analysis.

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Employing simultaneous search strategies to discover better designs, faster.

Most traditional design exploration tools require highly specialized optimization skills and simplification of models to allow for efficient search. However, by using HEEDS, you can streamline design exploration using your existing models no matter the complexity or number of parameters and constraints. Specify the time you are willing to wait for an answer, and the intelligent search functionality will adjust search strategies to find better design alternatives in the allotted time.

This process allows you to identify higher performing families of designs with minimal simulation time and cost.
This approach, known as SHERPA:

[icon name="icon-ok"] Requires no model simplification, model fitting or surrogates [/icon]
[icon name="icon-ok"] Uses hybrid, adaptive intelligent search to find better designs in fewer evaluations [/icon]
[icon name="icon-ok"] Helps you reduce search time, product development costs and product design risks [/icon]

Unlike with other design exploration methodologies, HEEDS works well with any number of design variables, constraints, or objectives. So the user is encouraged to set up the design study to reflect the exact engineering challenge being faced, rather than simplifying the search to conform to software limitations. HEEDS is regularly applied to problems with hundreds or thousands of design variables without difficulty.

Fan blade with parametric changes and correlating plots

Just define your design goals and tell HEEDS how many designs to explore and it will help you discover better designs faster. You can include any number of objectives, constraints, and design variables. It’s as simple as that!

Exclusive Search Technology

HEEDS's default search method, SHERPA, uses multiple search strategies simultaneously, and it dynamically adapts to the problem as it learns about the design space. The unique advantages of SHERPA include:

• Speed — SHERPA requires fewer evaluations than other methods and often finds a solution the first time, saving you days or even weeks of CPU time during routine optimization studies.
• Robustness — SHERPA identifies better-quality solutions, for broad classes of problems, and performs global and local optimization at the same time.
• No tuning parameters — With SHERPA, you only need to specify the number of evaluations you want to perform.

These capabilities make deploying design exploration throughout your organization a viable means to achieve innovative solutions. SHERPA removes the traditional obstacles of requiring expertise, iteration, limited deployment, allowing your engineers to focus on their design problem and not being an optimization expert.

Example of a typical HEEDS installation with remote execution

Specific capabilities include the ability to:

[icon name="icon-ok"] Leverage all available computing resources [/icon]
[icon name="icon-ok"] Reduce simulation turnaround with multiple levels of parallelization, including workflow, tasks, and cores [/icon]
[icon name="icon-ok"] Support unlimited load cases [/icon]
[icon name="icon-ok"] Orchestrate simulation tasks across platforms and operating systems [/icon]
[icon name="icon-ok"] Leverage efficient licensing schemes, high-performance computers (HPCs) and cloud resources [/icon]
[icon name="icon-ok"] Maximize your investment in virtual simulation with 24/7/365 run availability [/icon]

By using HEEDS, you can effectively leverage your existing hardware investment as the solution allows efficient use of all your hardware resources, including local, remote, cluster and cloud computing.

Example of the creation of compute resource templates

You can easily assign each modeling & simulation task to the most appropriate compute resources. You can mix and match operating systems (Windows & Linux) and you can access queuing systems, clusters, and cloud resources. You choose.

Fast, Parallel Execution

With HEEDS PARALLEL, you can run HEEDS design exploration studies faster and make more efficient use of your hardware and software resources. While parallelizing analysis tools is a great way to increase throughput, rarely do they offer a linear speed-up. If hardware and software availability warrant, increase your design exploration throughput in a linear manner but running multiple design concepts simultaneously.

[icon name="icon-ok"] Gain insight into product design alternatives [/icon]
[icon name="icon-ok"] Identify families of top-performing designs [/icon]
[icon name="icon-ok"] Indicate areas of cost-effective design changes [/icon]
[icon name="icon-ok"] Support design reviews by providing sensitivity to design variables [/icon]
[icon name="icon-ok"] Allow assessment of robustness to manufacturing tolerances [/icon]

Exploring design tradeoffs.

HEEDS provides users with the ability to easily compare performance over a wide spectrum of designs and find feasible design families that exhibit desirable characteristics and robustness. The software can help you understand design performance over any number of competing objectives and constraints.

By using HEEDS, you can easily identify the sensitivity of selected designs to input variables so you can confidently make immediate design decisions during reviews and identify predicted results.

In addition to identifying high performing designs that achieve performance targets, HEEDS also delivers insight to the engineer about design sensitivity, robustness, and trends. The goal is to help you drive greater product innovation.

Extensive Feature Set

Whether you need to improve the design of a simple engineered system or solve multidisciplinary problems, HEEDS is flexible and powerful enough to identify the values, or attributes, that will satisfy your design criteria. You can perform many different study types with HEEDS.