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What’s New in HEEDS 2022.1?

With more complex workflows seen across the HEEDS customer base, the release of HEEDS 2022.1 focuses on helping engineers stay organized. Creating process automation workflows that involve complex branching and looping is now more efficient and better structured.

Model the complexity – Ensuring decision confidence

Ensuring Knowledge Longevity and Collaboration of Engineering Methodologies and Workflows

Workflow annotations in HEEDS 2022.1

Engineers can now add annotations and comments directly to the process view canvas of a workflow. This enhances team collaboration and retains knowledge of methodologies when passing complex workflows across teams. You can now document any user-defined descriptions or comments associated with any part of the workflow. It is now possible to assign annotations to analyses, connections, groups, and loops. They also can be floating to help with describing processes and methods involved in the automation.

Furthermore, documenting your process automation workflows has been enhanced and streamlined by moving the location of the process comments to the right-hand side of the process view canvas, found just below the connections panel. This capability adds text formatting, hyperlink capabilities as well as embeddable images and enables you to fully document your process.

Explore the possibilities – Enabling insights

Boosting Capabilities for Dynamic Script Based Tagging

Script-based tagging in HEEDS now supports the full power of the Python programming language. You can now use all standard Python imports within script tagging. This allows for greater flexibility in locating and marking tags dynamically via if-then-else statements, regular expressions, etc.

When locations of tagged input and output parameters are not fixed for every design, script tagging specifies locations in an ASCII file. This is relative to consistent elements in the file, e.g. headers, line numbers, labels, etc.

Go faster – Achieving speed and agility

Enabling Traceability for Workflows and Systems Engineering

HEEDS 2022.1 can now connect from external data sources. This allows engineers to create and link parameters that have been defined previously, and elsewhere in Excel or MBSE tools. A new Data Connection tool is available on the Study tab where parameters and constraint requirements from data sources like TXT, CSV, XML, JSON and MagicDraw models.

In addition, HEEDS users can quickly export a table of study results to help verify and validate design requirements with the addition of the Reports toolbar group in the Run tab of HEEDS MDO.

Data Connections

Stay integrated – Connecting all activities

Enhancing HEEDS Connectivity to your Workflow Simulation Tools

New portal and updates to existing portals

This release of HEEDS expands the portal offering with new interfaces. The existing portals also have new improvements. Upgrades to Simcenter Prescan and MATLAB portals now pave the way for upcoming and exciting functionality.

For the Chemical Processing Industry sector, a new Aveva Pro/II portal is now available to automate Pro/II simulations via HEEDS. The addition of this portal makes it easier for optimized trade-offs of plant layout and performance to be discovered.

Both NX CAD and Simcenter 3D portals now support running designs within a single session. This reduces overhead and provides a faster turn-around time for designs within a study.

There are over 60 direct interface portals and the ability to connect to any internal, commercial 1D, 2D and 3D simulation tools as well as cost estimating tools. HEEDS continues to advance Multi-Disciplinary Process Automation, Design Space Exploration and Optimization across companies.

With design space exploration at the forefront of an organization’s innovative drive, entire product lines can see a transformative and dramatic change in performance. All enhancements and updates to HEEDS 2022.1 increase usability, connectivity, and productivity. You are more in control of the design process, the interpretation of results, and the insight and knowledge gained, to discover better designs, faster!

Learn more about HEEDS

HEEDS is a powerful design space exploration and optimization software package that interfaces with all commercial computer-aided design (CAD) and computer-aided engineering (CAE) tools to drive product innovation. HEEDS accelerates the product development process by automating analysis workflows (Process Automation), maximizing the available computational hardware and software resources (Distributed Execution), and efficiently exploring the design space for innovative solutions (Efficient Search), while assessing the new concepts to ensure performance requirements are met (Insight & Discovery). Read more here.

Jenny Barsotti
This article first appeared on the Siemens Digital Industries Software blog at https://blogs.stage.sw.siemens.com/simcenter/whats-new-in-heeds-2022-1/