Software Solutions

Indispensible Tools

It began with the Pratt & Miller race team’s desire for a competitive advantage in their development, analysis and testing of race cars, and their ability to formulate race strategy. The objective was to optimize their cars’ performance and win races.

Data acquisition systems can deliver massive volumes of information, but the trick is making sense of it and finding productive ways to make improvements. That’s where the proprietary software programs that Pratt & Miller has developed for racing pay off; they quickly and efficiently distill the volumes of data and lead engineers toward the right adjustments or changes.

A Competitive Advantage

Of course, these programs also can apply successfully to production car development, which can help give OEMs an advantage in a very competitive industry. Prime examples include Pratt & Miller’s LapTime Simulator software, with which engineers can predict and optimize a car’s performance, and the Vehicle Engineering System Software (VES), a powerful program that can store and manage large amounts of CAD, CAE, and other data for immediate use by any number of people for analysis, simulation, or decision-making.

“VES greatly reduces a development team’s turn-around time,” says Kumar Periannan, manager of the computer-aided engineering department. “They can do a lot of the preliminary development work in a virtual environment, and that’s much quicker and less expensive than building expensive prototypes and testing on pavement.”