Manage Subsystems

Introduction

A subsystem is a CAE representation of a self-contained assembly or group of assemblies within a larger system model. For example, the body of a car within a full vehicle simulation.

The Subsystem Browser allows you to fully model and organize the model into manageable subsystems to aide model management. Alternatively, it takes existing include model management and extends it to provide representation, revision, and configuration management. Management of subsystem connections should be controller using Attachments.

During the model build and assembly process, you would use the Part Browser to go from CAD to CAE model for a subsystem. Then, you would use the Subsystem Browser after each subsystem has been assembled.

Subsystem Creation

Any entity can be organized into a subsystem, as in the following image.

Figure 1.

Subsystems and Includes

There are special rules when working with subsystems related to Includes. There is a one-to-one relationship between subsystems and its Include. When creating a subsystem it will also create an Include, and all entities moved into a subsystem will be moved to the Include.

Subsystems do not support nested Includes, so if you drag the parent Include to a subsystem, all Includes will be flattened and merged into the parent Include.

Subsystems do not support multiple Includes. If you drag multiple Includes into the Subsystem Browser white space, you will have the option to create one subsystem per Include or to merge all Includes into a single subsystem. If you drag multiple Includes into an existing subsystem the Includes will be merged into that subsystem’s Include.