Motivation
What is the motivation behind SimCert? There are many aspects, but the key reason for starting this initiative is that a trustworthy, vendor-independent system for analyzing and comparing environment simulation solutions is a missing component in a market that is continuously adding solutions, vendors and users.
We, the hearts and brains of SimCert, come from a professional background in environment simulation and we are not bound to any specific party. Therefore, we can act as independent consultants. This gives us room for an unbiased assessments of different solutions and to do what someone just had to do – create transparency in this market segment.
Key Application: ADAS/AD Development
The development of systems that assist drivers (ADAS) or help them become passengers (AD) is one of the key applications for environment simulation. If you are not yet familiar with the process of developing these systems or if you want to read about our understanding of it – which is one of the reasonings behind this initative – you might want to read this page first.
In addition, our Glossary may help you understand the terms that we use troughout our website.
The Simulation Ecosystem
Take a look at the following figure which illustrates – on a very high level – the components involved in testing a system, sub-system, device or similar – referred to in this website as system-under-test (SuT) – in a virtual environment:
Once you dig deeper, the picture will turn a bit more complex (and is yet far from complete):
You can still see the core components in the figure above but there are more data and tools involved.
On a very basic level, you have a static environment, populate it with rules and actors in a scenario, and you execute the scenario in a combination of environment simulation and system-under-test. The results of your test runs will be stored in a recordings database, ready for a subsequent offline analysis.
The User – Vendor – Relationship
Why would you bother with all these details? Ultimately, you may just want to use a simulation system to assist you in verifying, validating and certifying your SuT for compliance with a performance requirement (which might be an internal or an external one).
But you can hardly do it on your own!
Therefore, you start to look for partners to assist you with your task. These may either be suppliers who provide a ready-to-go component or development partners who will help you getting your own system up-and-running and compliant with requirements. And, typically, you will end up with a combination of both options.
But who is the right partner?
In an ideal world, you – as a user – will be able to easily identify the right vendor for fulfilling your task, and the purchasing process will be a straightforward one:
But, actually it’s a quite tedious process you have to go through. First, you have to become an expert in what you are asking for. Then you have to identify potential vendors (always at risk of missing “the right one”), evaluate all of their offerings and identify the best fit. This takes a lot of time, involves many uncertainties and you will most probably end up with something like a project that is based on a commercially available product with a substantial share of services attached to it in order to adapt the product to your precise needs and to overcome deficiencies of the selected solution. The first stages of this process are shown in the following figure:
Everything will turn yet more complex if you have to identify components offered by different vendors that might be combined in order to create your individual solution.
Our Service
Whatever your process: SimCert will assist you. We provide an expert database and keep it up-to-date with information provided by the vendors and from actual users. Both data sources will be reviewed and verified before making it into our system. We make sure that latest updates of products are reviewed and included in the databases. In a future stage, we will be able to cross-check for compatibility between tools and data used or created by the tools. Ultimately, we will provide a matrix of how and under which circumstances tools of different vendors may be combined (disclaimer: again, this will be a future stage of our project).
The benefit for you is clear: you won’t have to look for potential vendors from scratch by yourself; instead, you may consult our system and, based on its information, you may be able to come up with a rather short, rated list of vendors that are a good fit for your “challenge”. It is then up to you to contact them and enter the usual purchasing process, but you can start from a far better basis in less time and with much more information about the market than you would otherwise have been able to retrieve. This will be a big benefit for you when it comes to talking to the individual vendors (and you can spare them the typical but meaningless question: “How do you compare to your competitors?“).
Your Feedback
After your project, we invite you to share your experience. And, most probably, the vendor you selected will also have improved their offering by incorporating your additional requirements. This information will make it into an update of our database. The next user of our system will benefit from both parties’ contributions.
We don’t care for the Price
One aspect is very important: SimCert is not interested in any financial aspects of the products. Pricing, discounts etc. are not relevant for any rating and have never been part of our motivation. But other commercial aspects like licensing, open source etc. are of interest, of course.
Disclaimer
Our story sounds good? Sill, there are clear limits of what we can achieve and what liability we may have. Please take notice of our Disclaimer.