Behavioral Modeling is fully integrated functionality in Pro/ENGINEER® 2000i and beyond that helps design engineers explore design ideas, optimize geometry, and interface with external applications. This unique technology captures the entire product definition and then automatically builds virtual prototypes that satisfy multiple objectives. Behavioral Modeling can be used with any Pro/ENGINEER parts or assemblies, whether new or created in previous releases.PTC is working diligently on making ModelCHECK easier to set up and use. We will be introducing new user interfaces and configuration wizards over the next few releases. A prime example is the configuration program written for GeomIntegrity-CHECK (click to view Fig. 2)

What areas of the product definition does Behavioral Modeling address?

The functional areas can vary widely depending on what product you manufacture. You could address design criteria like volume, mass, or minimum clearance. Another area is functional simulation such as stress, temperature, a motion study, or even pressure drop from a fluid dynamics analysis. Whatever virtual prototypes you might have, Behavioral Modeling can incorporate them into your Pro/ENGINEER model. By taking all of the virtual prototypes into consideration, it helps you improve your design.

Since PTC doesn’t offer a Fluid Dynamics module, how can Behavioral Modeling address that?

Behavioral Modeling can capture these virtual prototypes in one of three ways.
1. Internal analyses, which represent the out-of-box analysis capabilities.
2. External analyses, which enable anyone, including Enterprise Software Partners (ESP) and users, to integrate external applications.
3. User-defined analyses, which allow users to create their own custom measurements.

You can integrate any analysis that PTC doesn’t offer through external analyses. Look for PTC to announce some official ESP external analyses in the near future.

How exactly does it capture these analyses?

Behavioral Modeling captures analyses as a feature of your Pro/ENGINEER model, just like a datum plane, protrusion or round. As a result, these analysis features have a definite place in the regeneration sequence, which affects the answers of the analysis. This means that if you run the same analysis at two different points in the regeneration sequence, you will get two different answers for the mass, depending on the development of your model.

How does it improve my design?

Behavioral Modeling can improve your design in at least two ways. First, you can use the optimization capability to minimize or maximize a goal and maintain several limits. With the range of analyses it offers, Behavioral Modeling provides true multidisciplinary optimizations. Moreover, the optimization can actually be a feature, implying that functional goals are persistently maintained. For example, a crankshaft will always be balanced regardless of design changes. Second, Behavioral Modeling offers a unique capability called Design Exploration. Based on known design variables, this allows you to evaluate a range of design options.

How does Design Exploration work?

Let’s say that instead of minimizing or maximizing one goal like an optimization, you’re trying to minimize two goals simultaneously. Furthermore, your design has three dimensions that can change and ten intervals for each dimension. For that scenario, the total number of design iterations is 100. If you add one more dimension, the number of possible design variations increases exponentially and you suddenly have 1,000. In exploring design options, the difficulty becomes finding 100 designs equally spaced out in 1,000 or even 1,000,000 possibilities. Design Exploration gives you functional feedback for the range of options you are considering and helps you find the best design.

Behavioral Modeling’s purpose sounds very much like Pro/MECHANICA®’s. How do they relate to each other?

Behavioral Modeling and Pro/MECHANICA serve very similar purposes, but with one important difference. Pro/MECHANICA improves a design with respect to functional simulation. Behavioral Modeling improves a design with respect not only to functional simulation, but to all virtual prototypes. In fact, you can expect integration of Behavioral Modeling and Pro/MECHANICA in Pro/ENGINEER® 2002.

How do I learn more?

The best route to learning the technical aspects of Behavioral Modeling is to complete PTC’s course called Consistent Innovation with Behavioral Modeling. Please visit www.ptc.com for details. Your local PTC sales representative can also provide information about the PTC Global Services offerings for implementing Behavioral Modeling.

If you have additional questions about Behavioral Modeling, you can email Chad Jackson, Product Line Manager, at cjackson@ptc.com.