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AUDI AG, Automotive Application Activity leader of the EU-funded SIMDAT project has deployed a CAE-CAT integration demonstrator in its industrial infrastructure for further evaluation. Professor Ulrich Trottenberg, head of Fraunhofer Institute for Algorithms and Scientific Computing SCAI that co-ordinates the SIMDAT project, describes the demonstrator's objectives as "to demonstrate that the technologies developed in SIMDAT allow all parties involved in the functional design of cars to access and leverage product development data across distributed locations and disciplines." The demonstrator supports the demand of automotive engineers to correlate data from simulation with data from physical test, also known as CAE (Computer Aided Engineering) and CAT (Computer Aided Testing) data. Today, the data resulting from simulation, and test processes are stored in separate data management systems with heterogeneous data models, without common interfaces. This makes data correlation a tedious and error-prone task. The CAE-CAT integration demonstrator developed by the SIMDAT Automotive Activity partners AUDI AG, MSC.Software and ontoprise GmbH integrates this heterogeneous data from CAE and CAT via ontologies with SIMDAT Grid technologies ensuring secure communication. While SIMDAT Grid technologies ensure the seamless access of remote data sources the use of semantic technologies assures the seamless integration of heterogeneous data models. The demonstrator has successfully proven the value-add of the combination of the two technologies. "The CAE-CAT demonstrator proves the leading-edge achievements of the SIMDAT project," explains Senior Manager Dr. Stefan Mayer (MSC.Software). "Within Audi's CAE data and process management system MSC SimManager three real use-cases were defined: user navigation, curve comparison and comparison reporting." The key accomplishment is that the user is now able to view and use CAT data -- resulting from physical test -- in the same manner as CAE data, extracted by a virtual simulation. The user can even compare mixed data from both CAE and CAT. MSC SimManager acts as aggregated visualisation platform to provide a graphical user interface. Users can easily navigate through CAE simulations and CAT experiments and access corresponding data like curves, movies, values and pictures. Today, the growing competition in the automotive industry requires continuous reduction of development and innovation cycles while the demands on quality, safety and comfort are increasing. "Advances in CAE, CAD and CAT technologies and processes have contributed significantly to the ability of the automotive industry to keep up with these requirements," summarizes Audi's Head of CAE Methods, Dr. Karl Gruber. "The SIMDAT CAE-CAT integration demonstrator was developed to meet these challenges, and Audi will evaluate its usable industrial solutions and competitive advantage for the automotive application area." SIMDAT has received research funding by the European Commission under the Information Society Technologies Programme (IST), contract number IST-2004-511438. Maximum Community contribution to project: 11 Mio Euro, Project start: 1 September 2004, Duration: 48 months, Partners involved: 27. The project is coordinated by the Fraunhofer Institute SCAI in Sankt Augustin, Germany.