FORCE developed and implemented a complete Business Decision Support System (BDSS) that integrates both physical and databased materials modelling, into a coherent workflow (see Figure 2). This methodology creates a BDSS translation process that includes the model selection based on the quality attributes obtained from an analysis of the use case. The analysis starts by considering market, business, or end user triggers, such as need for an improved product, changes in regulations requiring or restricting the use of certain materials or components, changes in trends, etc. Substantial efforts have been directed towards defining specifications of the BDSS and in particular the terminology of the KPI and the whole process along with the EMMC.
To integrate materials modelling into a BDSS workflow, a set of software interface wrappers and metadata structures based on a materials modelling ontology have been developed and implemented within an integrated simulation framework developed in a previous EU project (SimPhoNy) resulting in the FORCE-SimPhoNy integrated simulation framework. It also integrates materials data repositories and dataspaces as well as multi criteria optimizations. For the latter, both open source as well as proprietary optimizer like, e.g. modeFRONTIER can be connected. The wrapper-based design of the BDSS allows easy integration of complex third party tools by integrating single plugins in the workflow, which, in turn, integrate complex tools like knowledge graphs and cost models.
For the generalized BDSS, a specially designed workflow management system with GUI was also developed. In addition, a remote execution tool (SimPhoNy-remote) to run CPU intensive numerical simulations on dedicated remote servers or special pre- and post-processing tools needed for those simulations has been established. This allows the easy installation of the core BDSS with its sensitive business data to be run in a controlled local IT environment.
Finally, work was carried out to develop and validate the specific modelling approaches and software interface wrappers for three industrial demonstration cases. All developments were then combined and applied to the three use cases to demonstrate the entire BDSS process and workflow. Simpler demo cases have also been implemented to enable easy testing of all components of the BDSS and to use them in training events.
