Innovations in product design:

The manufacturing industry is working hard to take advantage of the digital transformation known as Industry 4.0. Made possible by the convergence of data analytics, AI (Artificial Intelligence), robotics, IoT (Internet of Things), and other technologies, the fourth industrial revolution is changing the way products are designed, developed, and delivered.

To compete in this new era, manufacturers must be able to quickly create and update products in response to market conditions and consumer demands. One of the hallmarks of Industry 4.0 is unprecedented personalization, culminating in products that are custom-made for individuals with great efficiency.

Designers are adapting to new ways of working

According to Deloitte, most manufacturing executives are optimistic about the potential impact of Industry 4.0, and a full 84 percent of manufacturing, CxOs (C-Suite Level) are doing everything they can to prepare their workforces for the challenges and opportunities ahead.

For designers and engineers, this means being able to work on cross-disciplinary and often geographically dispersed teams, while dealing with shorter product life cycles and higher product complexity. Product development professionals are being forced away from their desks more than ever, to visit customers, present to management, work with suppliers, resolve shop floor issues, and capture ideas whenever inspiration strikes.

With this newfound freedom comes great responsibility. Designers and engineers need mobile devices that enable them to create digitized sketches and concept models on the fly, while providing 3D graphics performance that rivals the desktop workstation.

Thanks to GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) virtualization technologies, designers and engineers can perform advanced product design tasks at accelerated speeds – virtually wherever or whenever inspiration strikes. They can easily create digitized sketches on tablets, then convert them into visually correct, 3D concept models. Later in the design process, they can take advantage of photorealistic rendering using physically based materials and real-time effects such as ambient occlusion, which renders shadows more realistically. They can even use head-mounted Virtual Reality (VR) displays running on GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) -accelerated backpacks or mobile workstations so every stakeholder can immersively visualize and interact with models in context.

Team coordination is key, throughout the design process

Beyond giving product development teams the ability to move around more, GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) virtualization also ensures that everyone working on complex design files has access to the latest revisions with a single common model securely stored in the data center or cloud. Data centralization eliminates the need to synchronize multiple datasets or rework modifications that may have been made on out-of-date files.

As a product moves from the conceptual stage into the engineering stage, additional data starts to stream into the process, and teams are often expanded. When data is centralized, virtual machines can be set up quickly and matched to the exact performance requirements of knowledge workers or power users running graphics-heavy engineering applications.

For companies such as Honda, the impact of graphics-accelerated virtualization can have a global impact. The automaker’s research and development organization has 26 centers around the world, where designers and engineers turn innovative concepts into actual products. To help users effectively leverage the same environment from anywhere and on any device without a change in quality or performance, Honda turned to graphics-accelerated virtualization with NVIDIA Quadro Virtual Data Center Workstation (vDWS) software and the NVIDIA Tesla M60 GPU.

After an eight-month pilot, Honda executives concluded that NVIDIA virtual GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) technology was ideal for everyone from knowledge workers to power users who need quality performance when working with complicated designs and 3D analysis.

To make sure the right users have the right allocation, Honda rolled out three virtual client machines: High-range, mid-range, and standard, all with different CPU (Central Processing Unit) and GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) configurations. This system structure can flexibly allocate necessary virtual machines to users according to their operational characteristics.

Today, Honda R&D (Research & Development) centers and factories from Ohio to Tokyo are designing and developing in high-performance engineering workstation environments powered by NVIDIA Quadro vDWS. With graphics acceleration in the data center, NVIDIA Quadro vDWS empowers teams to use CAD/CAE (Computer Aided Design/Computer-Aided Engineering) applications on any device – even low-cost laptop computers.

Clearly, next-generation visual computing technologies like GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) virtualization can accelerate product development processes, giving design and engineering professionals the flexibility they need to fulfill important new roles and responsibilities in an Industry 4.0 world.