JLR to lead £10m virtual engineering programme

The £10million, five year project aims to help manufacturers bring more complex vehicles to market more quickly, by enabling designers to experience and make changes to creations in real time. The project leaders at the Universities of Cambridge, Leeds, Loughborough and Warwick hope the research will also help save costs and reduce environmental impact in product development by reducing the reliance on physical prototypes. Bob Joyce, JLR's engineering director, said: "While we already utilise a range of sophisticated virtual engineering tools and processes to design, engineer and test our new vehicles, we are keen to enhance the future capability of virtual simulation and tailor them for automotive product development. "We want to make advances in the simulated driver and passenger experience, including more realistic imagery, sounds and even smells. These projects will help us analyse increasingly complex cars at whole vehicle, system and component levels, as well as enhancing the high performance computers that industry will use in the future to mine increasing amounts of more complex data." The project, dubbed PSI (Programme for Simulation Innovation), is being funded by JLR, the EPSRC, and the four participating universities. "This collaboration will give the UK an opportunity to take a lead in virtual simulation technology," Joyce concluded.