Scaling simulation impact in a small team using modeFRONTIER, VOLTA and Runbox

Engineering teams are increasingly challenged to deliver faster and more reliable design decisions while system complexity grows and expert simulation resources remain limited. This situation is especially pronounced in small simulation teams that support multiple products, disciplines and stakeholders in parallel.
This presentation shares how a small industrial simulation team successfully implemented a scalable digital engineering environment using modeFRONTIER, VOLTA and Runbox, with a clear focus on productive and proven use cases rather than conceptual architectures.

modeFRONTIER is used as the backbone for automating multi disciplinary simulation workflows, including Design of Experiments, optimization and robustness studies across different model fidelities. These workflows integrate analytical approaches, 1D system simulations, structural FEA and CFD and are applied in several productive engineering tools, including automated pump simulation workflows, structural FEA based assessments of pump components, CFD based cooling performance evaluations of dosing units, NPSH assessment workflows, and simulation based swirl atomizer development studies.

VOLTA provides Simulation Process and Data Management (SPDM) capabilities to manage these workflows centrally, ensuring version control, traceability and controlled reuse of validated methods. To make expert level simulation workflows accessible beyond the simulation team, selected processes were deployed through Runbox, offering simplified web based user interfaces that allow engineers from different backgrounds to execute complex simulation studies reliably without exposure to underlying model complexity.
A key benefit of this approach is the democratization of simulation. By enabling design engineers to run simulations and simulation studies themselves using standardized and validated tools, the barrier to entry for simulation was significantly reduced. This led to increased simulation usage during development, more frequent “what if” analyses, and broader adoption of simulation based decision making. Simulation experts focus on developing and maintaining the methods, while design engineers can efficiently leverage these capabilities in their daily work.

The presentation concludes with key lessons learned from deploying these tools in daily engineering practice and an outlook on how this approach can be further scaled to additional applications and teams.