Credibility, collaboration, and transparency are increasingly important in making virtual testing trustworthy due to the global distribution of simulation activities and increasing regulatory compliance requirements. As a web-based simulation artifact management tool, ARTEXA effectively addresses these challenges. It enhances artifacts with comprehensive metadata and makes them accessible throughout the organization.
Cloud-based web tool
Intuitive access to artifacts without installation from anywhere
API first
Effortless integration and customization
Tool-agnostic
Management of simulation artifacts of various tools
Fast enrichment and upload
User guidance and pipeline integration
What is ARTEXA?
ARTEXA is the dSPACE software solution for simulation artifact management. This web-based tool is used to semi-automatically enrich artifacts (currently models or parameter sets) with metadata, upload them to a cloud backend (or similar), and make them accessible to the entire organization via an intuitive web portal. By tracking the artifact lifecycle and structuring the database content, ARTEXA establishes transparency and traceability.
Why is this necessary?
A simulation artifact management tool to ensure credibility and increase efficiency is necessary to ensure that simulation results used for regulatory compliance, safety validation, or system development are trustworthy, traceable and fit for their intended purpose. Considering that credible validation results are a consequence of a credible simulation process and a credible modeling process, establishing work with credible artifacts is key to a successful verification & validation process.
ARTEXA can be used to:
- Optimize workflows for the use of simulation artifacts
- Link the expertise of development experts from all over the world
- Make simulation and validation more credible
- Reduce the overall cost of artifact development
- Increase the quality of simulation results
- Introduce modern software development principles into existing structures
Key Benefits
Cloud-Based Web Tool
ARTEXA brings together engineers and developers in their daily work with simulation artifacts – no matter where the teams are located. Without installation, the database can be accessed via a web browser, making sharing content easy and intuitive. It is therefore well-suited for remote work and multi-location teams. Scaling up the number of users is effortless and automatic updates and data security can be handled well.
Focuses on an API-First Approach
ARTEXA is designed with an API-first approach to offer faster feature delivery, seamless integrations and more reliable experience. Its standardized, well-documented APIs enable easy customization and third-party connections, empowering customers to integrate ARTEXA into their unique workflows and processes.
Tool-Agnostic
ARTEXA supports various simulation tool artifacts by default and also offers the possibility to further enhance the supported artifacts by custom "plug-ins". For supported artifacts, ARTEXA generates metadata semi-automatically and supports the workflow for the specific simulation tool. This ensures cross-community collaboration and transparency in the entire organization.
Powers Fast Enrichment and Upload
A database alone does not add value. To be effective, it must be filled with content. ARTEXA streamlines the enrichment of artifacts with metadata and guides new users to a successful and error-free upload. Once initialized, validation and uploading routines can be integrated into existing pipelines for further automation and scalability.
Intuitive Web Portal
The ARTEXA web portal offers search, filter, and compare features to quickly narrow down the range of suitable artifacts. Within the artifact details page, the metadata can be analyzed further, including information for dependencies, contact persons, and lifecycle, for example. This enables the user to find the most suitable simulation artifact with the least effort and ultimately improve the simulation result quality and credibility.
Workflow
ARTEXA is designed to promote the collaboration of engineers and developers from multiple different communities. There is therefore a broad range of users and roles. For example, we assume that user groups have roles like simulation engineers, test engineers, model integration engineers, and model developers. Two characteristic workflows within ARTEXA can be identified: the "Provider" and the "Consumer" workflow. The "Provider" workflow contains activities that ensure the successful creation of metadata and the upload of the artifact with the metadata to the database. The "Consumer" workflow contains activities that lead to the successful download of a suitable artifact for the simulation.
The Workflow for a "Provider"
A typical "Provider" could be a model developer or model integration engineer. Providers invest a lot of time in creating their artifacts and want to ensure that the entire organization can benefit from them. The provider workflow takes place initially within the VSCode (Visual Studio Code) extension, which offers a user-guided workflow. During daily work, the upload of the artifacts to the ARTEXA database can be automated through a pipeline integration. ARTEXA also uses validation steps to ensure the error-free upload and creation of metadata.
Benefits for the Provider at a Glance:
- User guidance in the VSCode extension for the fast and error-free onboarding of artifacts and metadata
- Pre-built metadata templates and automatic creation of some metadata (e.g., dependencies) for several simulation tools to simplify the process
- Validation of metadata before upload for quality control
- Ability to integrate the onboarding into the existing continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline for further automation and scalability
The Workflow for a "Consumer"
A typical "Consumer" could be a simulation or test engineer. The consumer wants to find the most suitable artifact for their simulation with as little effort as possible. The consumer workflow takes place within the ARTEXA web portal that offers searching, filtering, and comparing features to identify suitable artifacts. Further details can be analyzed and the artifact can be downloaded for further use in simulation.
Benefits for the Consumer at a Glance:
- Search and filter mechanisms to find the most suitable artifact in the ARTEXA portal – regardless of the simulation tool
- Detailed comparison of simulation artifacts with customizable table based on metadata information
- Comprehensive artifact detail page, including links to dependent artifacts to further assess suitability or interface information, for example
- Option to define several areas with different user rights, e.g., for artifacts related to confidentiality agreements
- Automatic notifications for specific events
How does ARTEXA strenghten credibility?
- A credible validation can only work if the simulation and modeling processes are also credible. The foundation of credibility in these processes lies in credible simulation artifacts.
- ARTEXA serves as a centralized "one-stop shop" for the standardization of artifact management workflows across the entire company. Every user is required to provide specific metadata uniformly during artifact uploads, eliminating exceptions that could lead to siloed thinking. The rules are established by the company during the initial setup, not by dSPACE. This ensures that everyone views the same content, fostering a shared understanding of expectations and building confidence in the artifacts.
- ARTEXA monitors the artifact lifecycle and enforces rules based on the lifecycle states. For instance, when an artifact is designated as "published", all dependencies must also be "published". Transitioning between lifecycle states can be tied to quality gates to ensure a "published" artifact is ready for productive use, such as in homologation. Once an artifact is "published," it cannot be altered (except to be deprecated), serving as a quality freeze. The lifecycle states are: Planned, Draft, Published, and Deprecated.
- ARTEXA manages all relevant metadata required to evaluate credibility. For example, the ISO11010-1 model classification fidelity level can be easily used for database filtering and artifact comparison. The ARTEXA attribute scheme is fully customizable based on relevancy. In our product demonstration, we use the Model Identity Card (MIC) standard attributes as an example. Filtering, comparison, and further analysis are conducted based on these attributes. Additional model validity information can also be included in the attribute scheme.
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