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Today’s automotive industry produces more new car models in a shorter time than ever before. Every car model comes in many different versions regarding number of doors, engine, transmission etc while being built on a platform strategy. This leads to a lot of different knowledge and information that needs to be tracked for the different components in addition to other information e.g. what function does design features have, why is this radius not smaller etc. Volvo Car Corporation (VCC) is in need of an effective method to save and present all this knowledge and information today. This paper describes a new method, to gather and save knowledge and information about car body parts also called body-in white, which was implemented in a demonstrator and tested and evaluated on VCC.

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With an increasing number of and also more complex demands on today’s automobiles the need for fast and accurate simulations to support the Engineering Design (ED) process is getting more important. The demands that are put on the automotive designs are often contradictory i.e. weight against stiffness, and no one optimal set of solutions can be found, rather a trade-off situation. At Volvo Cars Corporation, known all over the world for their safety policy, the advancement to more high strength materials is causing new problems for the engineers. As widely known, a steel material that has been exposed to plastic deformation will suffer hardening in those areas. The work in this paper, exemplified in a deployed demonstrator, show that it is possible to combine forming and crashworthiness simulations in an automated way to make advanced simulation accessible to more people in the product development process. The Knowledge Enabled Engineering (KEE) demonstrator combines forming and crashworthiness simulations for dealing with the constant trade-off in ED.