MSC.Software Corp., the leading global provider of virtual product development (VPD) products including simulation software and services, today announced that Alenia Aeronautica Italy, a Finmeccanica company, has invested more than euro 100.000 in VPD products and services via MSC.Software's MSC.MasterKey licensing system. The Italian aeronautics company will use MSC.Robust Design and MSC.Nastran 2004 for stress testing and stochastic analysis of different engineering projects, including the design of the composite wing boxes and horizontal tails for new aircraft. In addition, the MSC.Software professional services team will be providing integration and customization of MSC.Robust Design within Alenia's product development process to ensure optimal compliance with manufacturing requirements. "MSC.Robust Design provides a new and more powerful insight into design sensitivity, allowing companies such as Alenia Aeronautica to manage risk and improve product quality, safety and performance by making the simulation of uncertainty a key component of the product development process," says Frank Perna, chairman and chief executive officer of MSC.Software. "The more complex a product is, the higher the chance that some combination of uncertainties will have an unexpected and potentially undesired effect. We are excited about the potential for MSC.Robust Design and are working hard to help other customers take advantage of this exciting technology within their product development processes." "Safety comes first in designing airplanes involving complex components with high demands on robustness. We were looking for a stochastic tool to improve the robustness of our wing box design and help to exclude uncertainties within the development process. We have known MSC.Software as a reliable partner for software and services for many years and when the question of a stochastic tool came up, we chose MSC.Robust Design. It gives us the possibility to unlock hidden knowledge in our virtual models and designs," said Dr. Ing. P. Cerreta - Alenia Aeronautica - Technical Director of 7E7 "For us, MSC.Robust Design opens the possibility to extract additional, often unexpected, information about our design. It helps us to obtain a realistic estimate of how our design will perform in terms of noise, vibration or crashworthiness. By using MSC.Robust Design, we can automatically consider a range of simulations that randomly varies the sheet thickness, material property scatter, weld imperfections or loading in order to simulate a realistic variety of outcomes. By taking into account the complexity of real world and providing a better understanding of the design sensitivity, MSC.Robust Design helps us to improve the product quality while at the same time gives us the possibility to develop faster, test more variants and therefore save time and money."