Nexus – New Standards for Optimization and Process Integration

Triggered by the unintuitive and high costs of existing design optimization software applications, iChrome set about developing a more user friendly and affordable optimization solution. Nexus brings you:


Through an intuitive work flow process, Nexus guides you step by step in setting up and running your analysis, giving you the best outcome as quickly as possible. There are four easy steps to build an integrated design process in Nexus:

WorkFlow

Defining the problem
  • What is the goal?
  • What are the requirements and constraints?
  • Which other software applications will be used for this analysis?

To make sure the data required is correctly entered, Nexus validates, on the fly, input data and highlights incorrect entries. For users who are unfamiliar with the subject of optimization algorithms, Nexus provides a simple optimization selection wizard that recommends which algorithm is the best one for the specific problem.

TaskFlow

Defining the analysis
  • What is the Optimization strategy that will be applied?
  • Is it a Design of Experiments for a trade-off study?
  • Is it a Response Surface analysis for a sensitivity study or fast evaluation loop?

For users who are unfamiliar with the subject of optimization algorithms, Nexus provides a simple optimization selection wizard that recommends which algorithm is the best one for your specific problem.

Evaluate

Running the analysis
  • Monitor results as they are generated
  • Pause and restart the analysis
  • Increase and decrease the number of executors

Depending on what computing resource is available at the time, Nexus allows you to increase and decrease the amount that is used for the analysis.
This means during peak times (working hours for example) Nexus will utilise the limited resource that is available. However during off peak times (overnight for example), this can be increased to the maximum allowance, without having to stop the analysis. This not only leads to a reduction in the overall analysis time but also fully utilises the computing resource available maximising the investment made in the hardware.

Insight

Mining your results
  • Review results as tables, plots and charts
  • Pick the best outcome
  • Reuse results as inputs for further analysis

Nexus provides all data and results in the same tabular format, which means it is not locked down to only certain parts of the application, so information from the results section can be easily utilised for data input at the start of the work flow phase. Advanced data processing tools are provided to analyse results and extract important information in an easy way. These include interactive editing, results sorting and filtering, statistical analysis and data extraction using SQL query expressions.