Simulation Science

From crash tests to climate change: Simulations make it possible to get a little closer to complex reality and predict its behavior with the help of computer-based, dynamic models. Simulation science has therefore become an indispensable part of research and development in many different areas and makes a key contribution towards technological progress in our society.

The Simulation Science Profile Area at the University of Stuttgart is dedicated to further and new development as well as the systematic pooling of different methods and approaches to modeling and simulation. To this effect, simulation is not only a method, but the subject of research. Novel, data-driven approaches contribute to making simulations more efficient, predictions more accurate, and decisions more reliable in many scientific fields, for example in the environmental sector, in the development of new materials, or in medical science.

Originally, simulation research at the University of Stuttgart started in the engineering sciences and in mathematics. Today, the expertise of about 250 scientists from seven of the university’s faculties is pooled in the Profile Area. This allows the exploration of simulation techniques in their full disciplinary spectrum as well as the merging of different approaches and methods into an integrated simulation science. A new paradigm is now being sought with the systematic integration of data into this science. These data come from experiments, other simulations, and algorithms that the scientists developed during their work.

The Cluster of Excellence EXC 2075 “Data-Integrated Simulation Science (SimTech)”, which is integrated into the Stuttgart Center for Simulation Science (SC SimTech), is facing a large variety of novel research tasks and is concerned with the relevance of insights and knowledge that can be gained from the wealth of data from sensors, digitized collections, experiments, and simulations. The long-term research objective is the systematic integration of information from different data types into the modeling-simulation-analysis cycle.