The Smart Design program
The development methods for complex systems are changing greatly to incorporate the use of products and services throughout their life cycle, reduce time to market and integrate eco-responsibility. Smart Design provides concrete and innovative digital solutions for the design of sustainable systems, the management of uncertainties and the traceability of their requirements.
Context and challenges of the Smart Design program
With the Smart Design program, ALTEN Labs is developing disruptive approaches to meet the challenges of designing complex technical systems that incorporate product, service, process and organisational aspects. The increasing interdependence of technologies, uses and environmental and safety constraints requires us to question and control the technical, human and financial resources that were allocated ahead of the design stage. Our goal? Measure their impacts over the whole life cycle.
Our goal? Measure their impacts over the whole life cycle.
At the same time, development cycle times must also be drastically reduced to meet the crucial time-to-market criteria.
The challenge is therefore twofold:
- Be more flexible and think ahead in the out-of-cycle design process to reduce effective in-cycle development time,
- Control the levels of complexity and uncertainty at the different validation scales (analysts, architects, project, programme, etc.) of the digital design process.
“Do better, faster, more accurately”.
- How can we manage diverse and changing requirements at the earliest possible stage?
- How can we anticipate an increasingly uncertain world?
- How can we address the different aspects of eco-design?
- How can we improve the safety and reliability process?
To answer these problems, Smart Design addresses three areas of work:
- Design of complex systems
- Design of sustainable systems
- Design under uncertainty
The Smart Design programme optimises all processes and products during their life cycle, with the main objectives being:
- Integrating and digitising requirements through new requirements engineering practices based on a Model-Based System Engineering (MBSE) approach and gathered under the name Smart Requirement Modelling (SRM)
- Confronting different visions of eco-design via the optimum of materials, performances, methods and uses
Example projects
Formalisation, digitisation & simplification of requirements traced throughout the life cycle of industrial products, using SRM methodologies
Propagation models of requirement uncertainties on complex systems, such as a Flight Management System,
MBRe (Model Based Requirements) & MBSA (Model Based Safety Analysis) on a complex mechanical system
- Design of a liquid hydrogen tank using composite materials
- Design of a GESS (Green Energy Storage System) of recycled Renault Zoé batteries
- Multidisciplinary eco-design of a drone and modular, safe and recyclable batteries
Use of cryptographic technologies (NFT: Non-Fungible Token) in product design to prevent counterfeiting
High performance aerodynamic optimisation for competitive cyclists
The Sports Science projects
The quest for ultimate sporting performance demands meticulous attention to detail, and a thorough understanding of oneself and the environment. Mastery of simulation tools and data processing is a decisive asset, complementing the physical and mental aspects.