Siemens Partnership Fuels Autonomous Vehicle Development

Simulation and data management are essentials for the development of any complex engineered product, perhaps even more so for autonomous and connected vehicles. To jumpstart development in this emerging category, Siemens Digital Industries Software has partnered with MaRS Discovery District, a Toronto-based innovation hub, to provide its member companies with access to Siemens’ Xcelerator portfolio of software.

As part of the relationship, eligible companies will gain a year of free access to Siemens’ NX Mock3 CAD software, Simcenter PreScan simulation tools, and Teamcenter PLM platform. Within its ecosystem, the MaRS Discovery District hosts about 1,400 Canadian science and technology companies, many of which are working on advancing autonomous and connected vehicle design. “AV, connected vehicles, and intelligent transportation infrastructure are among the six areas where we are focusing our energy and resources to identify startup companies that want to innovate,” says Oshoma Momoh, chief technical advisor at MaRS.

While most startups leverage CAD for design, the need to expand the tools portfolio in areas like software and data management is critical, especially for the design of highly complex products like AV, where iteration and validation is continuous and very difficult to do in a physical prototyping environment, Momoh explains. “With autonomous vehicles, there is a huge amount of safety and validation work that needs to be done and that’s where the Siemens tools come into play,” he says. “It’s about doing massive verification of products virtually and testing with simulation.”

Specifically, Simcenter Prescan is tuned for advanced simulation of autonomous systems, helping to reduce field testing and expand coverage over infinite possible real-world scenarios—an important hurdle when developing autonomous vehicles. Teamcenter provides data management, collaboration, and traceability capabilities that can improve product delivery and promote reuse, accelerating development cycles and eliminating costly rework. Teamcenter’s data management capabilities, in particular, are critical to accommodate the huge amounts of data collected from radar, Lidar, and artificial intelligence, Momoh says.

Siemens and MaRS work together to find potential startups that would be the best match for the software and specifically, for which elements of the Siemens platform. Once selected, the partners put together a curriculum that instructs engineering users in how use the tools as well as how to optimize for particular use cases. MayaHTT, a long-time Siemens partner with experience in technical challenges from chip design to full vehicle system validation, supports the MaRS companies with software development and training services. Eligible participants can make use of the software for a year free of charge along with the training.

Watch this clip to get an introduction on Siemens’ Simcenter Prescan.