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“The use of HEEDS and its capability to effectively optimize over numerous variables in complex conditions has significantly increased dummy model accuracy, as well as the efficiency of our development process. Achieving our goals without the use of HEEDS technology would prove to be almost impossible.” 
— John Cooper, Vice President of Virtual Products, Denton ATD

 

"HEEDS Professional has changed everything for our research team! It has enabled us to navigate toward superior-performing, biomimetic, elastomeric skin designs for our tactile sensors."   — Dr. Lorenzo M. Smith, Department of Mechanical Engineering, Oakland University


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HEEDS Professional Design Optimization Software

Design to Win. Faster.

HEEDS® Professional is an intuitive and powerful software package that interfaces with all of the popular CAE applications to automate the design optimization process. Employing revolutionary search strategies, HEEDS removes the restrictions of conventional numerical search methods, yielding new design concepts that drive product improvement and competitive advantage. It intelligently conducts a broad, efficient search for optimized designs, often in a fraction of the time it would take to perform a handful of manual iterations. Using HEEDS, engineers can overcome the limits of human intuition and even professional experience.

Multidisciplinary
HEEDS Professional is truly a multidisciplinary design optimization tool. Whether the problem is structural (linear or nonlinear, static or dynamic, bulk materials or composites), fluid, thermal, or acoustic in nature, involves NVH and dynamics, or any combination of these or other disciplines, HEEDS Professional can help you find the optimal solution.

Intuitive to Use
Although the technology behind HEEDS and its powerful search engine is complex, the software itself is user-friendly. The HEEDS interface features a unique tabbed layout that leads you clearly and quickly through the six-step process of project setup and execution. You do not need to be an ex­pert in optimization theory to use HEEDS Professional effectively.

Easily Integrated with Your Preferred CAE Packages
HEEDS Professional is compatible with all of the popular CAE applications to automate and expedite the design optimization process. It can easily work with multiple software tools to handle pre- and post-processing, simulation, and multidisciplinary optimization. In addition to a powerful generic interface that allows HEEDS Professional to link to virtually all commercial and proprietary CAE tools, HEEDS also features direct interfaces for Abaqus, LS-DYNA, NX, and Excel. >>Learn more

Exclusive Search Technology: SHERPA
HEEDS' default search method is a hybrid, adaptive algorithm called SHERPA. SHERPA employs multiple search strategies simultaneously and adapts to the problem as it "learns" about the design space. The unique advantages of SHERPA include:
  • Efficiency — SHERPA requires fewer evaluations than other methods for a broad range of problems and often finds a solution the first time. This efficiency can save you days or even weeks of CPU time during common engineering optimization studies.
  • Robustness — SHERPA identifies better-quality solutions for broad classes of problems, and performs global and local optimization at the same time.
  • Ease of use — With SHERPA, there are no tuning parameters. Simply specify one parameter—the number of allowable evaluations.

    >>    Learn more about HEEDS' exclusive search technologies

Extensive Feature Set
Whether you need to improve the design of a simple engineered system or solve multidisciplinary problems, HEEDS Professional is flexible and powerful enough to rapidly identify the parameter values, or attributes, that satisfy your design criteria.

  • Design Optimization — Advanced optimization algorithms and intelligent strategies, including: SHERPA, Multi-objective SHERPA, genetic algorithm, quadratic programming, simulated annealing, response surface, multi-start local search. >>Learn more
  • Design of Experiments (DOE) — Full-factorial designs, fractional factorial, designs, Taguchi orthogonal arrays, Plackett-Burman designs, Latin hypercube designs, central composite designs, D-optimal designs, Taguchi robust design arrays, user-defined arrays and response data. >>Learn more
  • Robustness and Reliability — Taguchi robust design arrays, structured sampling, and random (Monte Carlo) sampling. >>Learn more
  • Process Automation — Direct portals to common CAE tools for data extraction; automated execution of multiple simulation and analysis tools within a design evaluation process; integration and sharing of data among separate simulations; support for parallel processing on networks, clusters and multiprocessors. >>Learn more

HEEDS Professional Interface

Obtain a greater understanding of your design space, including tradeoffs among competing objectives, and relationships among variables and objectives, through HEEDS' extensive graphical and tabular views of your design study results.