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Design Manager
Design Manager provides an automated approach within Simcenter STAR-CCM+ to run design exploration studies. Design exploration covers both performance assessment and optimization.
Design Manager Workflow
The following steps outline the recommended workflow to set up, run, and post-process a design study in Design Manager.
Running a Design Study
Design Manager provides various settings to control the run of a design study and the compute resources to use.
Stopping, Extending, and Resuming a Design Study
You can stop, extend, and resume one or more design studies in a single action.

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Design Manager
Design Manager provides an automated approach within Simcenter STAR-CCM+ to run design exploration studies. Design exploration covers both performance assessment and optimization.
- Study Inputs
  In Design Manager, study inputs are parameters that you define in the reference simulation and that Design Manager can modify during design studies.
- Study Outputs
  For each design simulation in a design study, Design Manager allows you to record and write specific outputs.
- Surrogate Models
  In Design Manager, a surrogate is a predictive function that returns an estimated response value for a given set of numerical input parameters. Design Manager computes surrogate functions by fitting data from design study simulations to chosen surrogate models such as Kriging or Least Squares.
- Study Types
  Design Manager offers several types of design study by which you can explore the design space of your product.
- Study Runs
  Design Manager allows you to run design studies on your local workstation or on a high performance cluster. You can run the design simulations sequentially or concurrently, in serial or in parallel. In addition, you can customize the simulation run by inserting Java macros that contain additional setup for the simulation. Design Manager optimizes runs by caching meshes and reusing them where possible.
- Study Analysis
  Design Manager provides post-processing capabilities by which you can analyze the outputs of a design study.
- Design Manager Licensing
  The licenses that are required for running a design study in Design Manager depend on the type of study and the specified run settings. Also, different steps within the Design Manager workflow have particular license requirements.
- Design Manager Workflow
  The following steps outline the recommended workflow to set up, run, and post-process a design study in Design Manager.
  - Setting Up the Reference Simulation
    Every design study requires a reference simulation from which to start. In this reference simulation you create and expose the design and global parameters by which Design Manager can modify the simulation setup. You also prepare reports, plots, and scenes for feedback and analysis.
  - Creating a Design Manager Project
    The process for creating a Design Manager project is integrated within the same user interface as you use for a Simcenter STAR-CCM+ simulation.
  - Setting Up a Design Study
    Setting up a design study requires that you choose the type of study, set its properties, and choose appropriate input parameters and responses. Additionally, you choose scenes and plots that you want Design Manager to export from each design simulation.
  - Running a Design Study
    Design Manager provides various settings to control the run of a design study and the compute resources to use.
    - Running Locally
      For small simulation sizes, a local machine with a high number of cores and memory can give sufficient compute resource for a design study.
    - Running on a Linux Cluster Using General Job Submission
    - Running on a Linux Cluster Using Pre-Allocation
    - Running on a Windows HPC Cluster Using General Job Submission
      To run a Design Manager project on a Windows HPC cluster, you must submit the project in general job submission mode. General job submission means that Design Manager submits each design simulation individually to the HPC Job Scheduler.
    - Stopping, Extending, and Resuming a Design Study
      You can stop, extend, and resume one or more design studies in a single action.
    - Design Studies: Abort and Resuming after Abort
      Design Manager can abort for reasons such as hardware conflicts or lack of system resources. When it does abort, you can resume the aborted design study from the last completed design.
    - Re-running a Design Study or Selected Designs
      After running a design study you can re-run the entire design study with modified settings or selected designs due to run failure.
    - Assessing Impact of Modified Constraints
      After running the design studies, you can modify constraints and assess the impact of the change on results without re-running the design study.
  - Monitoring a Design Study
    In the GUI, you can check the progress of a running design study in the progress and status bar beneath the explorer window. You can also view post-processing objects while a design study runs, allowing you to view progress interactively.
  - Analyzing the Design Study Results
    Design Manager provides a number of post-processing elements by which you can examine the results of a design study. For each design study type, Design Manager gives you a pre-configured design study dashboard that contains the most relevant elements for the study type. Design study dashboards are built on the layout view mechanism within Simcenter STAR-CCM+.
  - Generating and Applying Surrogate Models
    A study runs significantly faster when you compute responses using surrogate models instead of simulations. In Design Manager, a typical application for surrogate models is a Robustness and Reliability study with a large number of sample points in the design space.
  - Analyzing the Design Study Results
    Design Manager provides a number of post-processing elements by which you can examine the results of a design study. For each design study type, Design Manager gives you a pre-configured design study dashboard that contains the most relevant elements for the study type. Design study dashboards are built on the layout view mechanism within Simcenter STAR-CCM+.
  - Launching Design Manager in Teamcenter
    Teamcenter is a product lifecycle management tool, in which you embed and monitor multidisciplinary development stages of a product—from geometry construction, flow analysis, thermal management to material selection. As part of design exploration, Teamcenter supports the creation, modification, and execution of design studies using Design Manager.
- Design Manager Reference
  The following properties and right-click actions are available for a Design Manager project.
- Troubleshooting Design Manager
  If you encounter problems when setting up or running a design study, check these common problem scenarios for advice on how to proceed.

Stopping, Extending, and Resuming a Design Study

You can stop, extend, and resume one or more design studies in a single action.

To stop a design study:

In the Design Manager project, right-click the respective design study node and select Stop Study.
Executing this action on multiple selected studies stops all the studies in sequence.

Stopping a design study prevents Design Manager from starting new design simulations. Design simulations that are already running are not killed but run until completion.

If you stopped a design study, you can resume it where it picks up from the last completed design:

Right-click the design study node and select Run Study.
Design Manager submits the outstanding design simulations.

If a design study completes but further design simulations are needed to achieve the desired results, you can extend the design study:

Adapt the settings of the design study as required.
Example: To extend a study, you can decrease the increment of the input parameter values or increase the number of designs to run.
Select File > Save and save the project file.
Run the design study.
Design Manager automatically detects which designs are already evaluated and submits design simulations for the additional designs.