Hexagon’s booth at Hannover Messe 2024.

Germany’s Hannover Messe can be a show of excesses, with too many halls to visit, too many new products to see, and never enough time — or walking stamina — to take it all in. But the show is full of little nuggets of information that help engineers and designers find solutions to do their jobs better. Here are some of the things I learned from speaking with Tarik El Dsoki, Regional Director Central EMEA & Managing Director DACH for MSC Software (which is owned by Hexagon AB).

• The company’s Nexus product is a kind of neutral platform in the cloud, receiving data from different sources including third party products. This facilitates data exchange, enabling engineers to make more informed decisions.
• Today’s version of reverse engineering, where old parts can be scanned and converted into digital models for further analysis and engineering, underscores the integration of modern techniques with traditional engineering methods.
• El Dsoki sees digital twins, which offer a virtual representation of physical assets, as being able to enhance things such as maintenance strategies. A normal used car buyer may only receive limited information from the prior owner. How much better, he asks, could you plan your maintenance schedule if you knew that the original owner drove in in colder areas, hotter areas, or somewhere like Brazil, with high humidity levels? Given that our resources are limited, it’s always preferable to have more data on what a piece of machinery has encountered thus far in its life cycle.
• He noted how, in the 1990s, Volkswagen was working on changing over from steel to aluminum. The idea they had was this: No change in the process, no change in the die. Just use an aluminum sheet instead of the steel sheet. And it should work, right? But it didn’t work. You need to consider what material you’re using, as well as the specific type of that material. To change a process like that, you need strong cooperation with the material science experts to have a better understanding of how mathematically to formulate things — and to describe the behavior of different materials.
• We’re not yet in a situation where we don’t need prototyping, but we need it much less than before and much later than before. In the 1990s in Germany and Europe, the automotive market was developing a car in roughly seven years. At that time in the U.S., it was roughly five years, and in Japan it was about three years. El Dsoki said that in Europe, they are now more or less aligned with the rest of the world. “We are much faster thanks to simulation, which was adapted by other areas in the world much earlier,” he explained.
• Today, simulation is not only being used in industries like automobiles and aerospace, but also in consumer products, energy, and electricity. In electronics, for example, people generally don’t think that simulation would play a large role. But because of the requirements the electronic industry — and the chips needed to deliver them today — they are getting hotter and hotter. So, they often have temperature issues that simulation can be used to address.
• El Dsoki sees the integration of AI and digital engineering tools as key future developments. AI can play a crucial role in analyzing vast amounts of simulation data, enabling more efficient decision-making. This is particularly important in scenarios like autonomous driving, where thousands of simulations are required to account for various conditions and events.