News

VOLTA Release 2019 | Spring now available

5 March 2019

ESTECO announces that VOLTA Release 2019 Spring is officially available with significant improvements in the users experience. While maintaining software quality and high performances, the latest edition of ESTECO technologies expands its usability to a different level with advanced data intelligence and new Machine Learning algorithms. From an extension of the Autonomous Optimization mode to RSMs, to a brand new RSM tool, supporting multiple optimization sessions, the work of engineering design has never been so smooth.

OPTIMIZATION-DRIVEN DESIGN

Autonomous Optimization

When time and resources management is critical, the Autonomous optimization function, using ESTECO state-of-the-art algorithm pilOPT,  provides the perfect shortcut. Designed for complex engineering problems, the new environment helps making the

most of the knowledge available to explore and improve the design while taking care of the optimization automatically.

Response Surface Model (RSM)

Enjoy the new RSM experience with the refactored RSM training tool. Gain access to advanced statistical methodologies with this smart new feature. Try out the intuitive interface with a step indicator that keeps updates on the progress and the smart defaults that help train RSMs quickly. Make use of best practices for predictive models training, reduce redundancies and allow efficiencies when fine-tuning the training configuration.

Algorithm Improvements

Benefit from another step towards a unique user experience with the integration of machine learning algorithms among the RSMs in modeFRONTIER. Part of the H2O.ai library, AutoML and Distributed Random Forest (DRF) algorithms, respectively automates the machine learning workflow and provides powerful regressions. AutoML automates the RSM training procedure within a user-specific time-limit, training and tuning automatically many models to obtain a highly predictive RSM. DRF is known to work well also with a mix of continuous and categorical inputs.

ENGINEERING DATA INTELLIGENCE

VOLTA advisor

Explore design data, acquire new insight and make the right decisions with our unparalleled widget library in VOLTA. Now enriched with 6 new charts to choose from:

  • Comparison Table – Visualize and compare designs side-by-side and easily spot the differences between them
  • Performance History Chart – Monitor the values of a variable across designs and observe its improvements
  • Scatter Matrix Chart - Grasp the measure of association between pairs of variables
  • Broken Constraint Chart - Identify which constraints are causing designs to become unfeasible
  • Probability Function Chart -  Learn how variable values are distributed across the variable domain
  • Correlation Matrix Chart -  Get correlation coefficients between multiple variables

USABILITY

modeFRONTIER Sessions

Engage with the new fruition of our DOE experience: explore how to use the concept of Sessions. A Session is defined by the Design Exploration strategy and the Workflow domain. Within modeFRONTIER you can now:

  • Explore and refine the design space by running multiple Session in the same modeFRONTIER project.
  • Adopt Session Tables, which store evaluated designs in a dedicated table for each Session, allowing the comparison of lots of different run results and the observation of the all-time best designs
  • Define multiple Design of Experiments strategies, for an efficient statistical analysis of the alternatives in the design space or for efficient analysis of different initial populations for optimization algorithms.

For all other new features please refer to the release notes included in the software update.