Bombardier uses modeFRONTIER to optimize high-speed trains

Bombardier uses modeFRONTIER to optimize high-speed trains for drag reduction and improvement of cross-wind stability.

In recent years, the German and Swedish based company has turned to modeFRONTIER to drive the design simulations, in order to try to achieve improved greater drag reduction, increased speed with lower traction power and increased cross-wind stability. modeFRONTIER was an ideal choice of tool for this work for a variety of reasons:

the problem is inherently multi-objective (a low-drag configuration will not be stable in a cross-wind and vice-versa, and hence a suitable algorithm was required which would find a balance, or trade-off, between the conflicting solutions; in this case modeFRONTIER’s genetic algorithms were used

several CAE tools needed to be integrated into a single environment, to ensure that the process would run repeatedly without the need for human intervention; this was done in the modeFRONTIER workflow editor

some of the CAE tools in use were located in the Vaesteros location, while others were in Berlin; here the ability to integrate even distributed tools in a modeFRONTIER workflow proved invaluable