Altair has signed a memo of understanding (MoU) with Rolls-Royce Germany to collaboratively connect artificial intelligence (AI) and engineering to derive business value across Rolls-Royce’s engineering, testing and design of aerospace engines.

Rolls-Royce Germany is targeting digital transformation and has identified engineering as a key area. In particular, the collaboration with Altair will address structural analysis and testing, bringing together product and in-service data from disparate sources to integrate new AI-driven engineering use cases.

“As a pioneer of the convergence of data analytics and engineering, it’s a natural fit for Altair to collaborate with Rolls-Royce Germany, an organization that sees the power of technology and the potential of AI to unlock game-changing business value,” says James R. Scapa, founder and chief executive officer, Altair. “The demand for easy-to-use, low/no code, yet flexible AI and machine learning tools has never been greater. It is an honor to be the technology provider of choice to help Rolls-Royce Germany boost its business while also further evolving our data analytics solutions.”

The Altair and Rolls-Royce Germany collaboration will address ause cases, including applying data science to the vast amounts of engineering testing data, which can lead to a significantly reduced number of sensors needed. This single use case alone has the potential to reduce recurring costs by millions of Euros.

“We share a common vision on the convergence of AI and engineering to drive significant positive business outcomes. Altair has unique domain expertise and best-in-class, low-code data analytics technology. This collaboration will enable us to bridge the gap between engineering and data science, and empower our engineers to truly be engineers, focused on extracting the benefits of machine learning and AI from our data,” says Dr. Peter Wehle, head of Innovation and R&T, Rolls-Royce Deutschland. “Ultimately this collaboration will help to democratize our data analytics, enabling our engineers to make better daily data-driven decisions, and transform our business and products.”

Rolls-Royce has been using AI and advanced data analytics in its business for more than 20 years, including in its engine health monitoring service, as well as manufacturing. It has recently announced two breakthroughs in AI ethics and trustworthiness, which it will publish for free on its website later this year.

Initially, Rolls-Royce Germany will leverage Altair Knowledge Works—a collaborative end-to-end data analytics platform—to enable engineers to apply machine learning (ML) methods using data for simulation, test, manufacturing and operations. Knowledge Works is designed so users can easily and efficiently access disparate data sources and formats in a low code/no code environment, transform the data, use it to build ML models, and share knowledge discovery across the business.

Sources: Press materials received from the company and additional information gleaned from the company’s website.

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