13. Digital Mock-up

Product development in the mobility industry is characterized by extreme time-to-market, high product complexity, cost pressure and many geographically dispersed stakeholders. Thus, efficient control mechanisms are necessary to manage a seemingly unmanageable project successfully and to achieve a strong finish. Digital mock-up (DMU) serves, as a central validation instrument in such a complex scenario, not only to visualize spatially the current status of the virtual product but also to evaluate the project’s progress. In conjunction with a high-variant product structure, as it is the case in modern vehicles, the use of DMU makes the check of the spatial consistency of the overall product possible, taking over what today’s CAD and PDM systems alone are not capable of. Taking the function of the product into account, the result is the so-called functional DMU (FDMU) which aims at facilitating the direct experience of functions on the virtual model in the overall context of the product. While DMU offers a visual straightforward human interface for control, DMU creation, calculation and processes can be automated well, so that the spatial test (collision check, assembly check) can be performed for all conceivable product variants in batch during the night). Nevertheless, human intervention is still required for the solution of design conflicts. Although all current problems are not yet solved in the context of DMU, leading PLM vendors do offer powerful tools to support the DMU process. Due to its central role in the development process DMU is subject of intensive research and development for speeding up the process and to increase accuracy.