ANSYS, Inc., a global innovator of simulation software and technologies designed to optimize product development processes, announced an alliance with the National Science Foundation (NSF) Center for e-Design to help revolutionize the way companies design products. Ultimately, the goal for both ANSYS and the Center for e-Design is to provide, through on-going collaboration, a best-of-class environment for true, virtual simulation and prototyping tools that enable engineers to check for design problems in a secure computer-based environment. A key objective of the Center for e-Design is to develop a "systems engineering approach to design, pro-activeness of analysis, virtual prototyping, lean product data management, multidisciplinary constraints and preference capturing, and instant access and visualization." "ANSYS is committed to delivering leading edge solutions in this very important area of global teamwork," said Jim Cashman, president and CEO at ANSYS. "Simulation and collaboration are key linchpins in our drive to unlock the creative process of innovation. Our strategic alliances with leading research organizations, like NSF, will allow our customers to collaborate with their supply chains to deliver products in a dramatically reduced timeframe." This collaborative effort will be based on a new ANSYS Workbench Software Development Kit. Areas of collaboration will include: The Center's work on tools for secure engineering collaboration via the Internet (A protocol that protects a company's proprietary and intellectual properties); secure use of distributed Internet assets including remote super-computers and parallel processors; leveraging of the Center's Assembly Relationship Model (ARM), a data-exchange protocol that allows thin physical interface data communications between parts and components in an engineered assembly over a secure network. An additional area of collaboration will address engineering standard feature- recognition across parametric computer-aided design (CAD) and analysis environments. "Much like the Internet has revolutionized the world of commerce in advertising and marketing, this NSF research center will introduce a new product design and realization paradigm based on a service-oriented information infrastructure that will allow product design and supply chain stakeholders to collaborate remotely and for heterogeneous system, and data to interoperate seamlessly," said Bart Nnaji, director of the NSF Center for e- Design. "The future product design and realization environment will allow for virtual simulation and prototyping based on the laws of physics. We expect that our collaboration with ANSYS will enable the company to leverage the tremendous energy and creativity available at the center in addressing technology barriers that impede rapid product evolution."