Introduction to Asset Management
Simulation engineers working in the COMSOL Desktop modeling environment often do so in the context of some broader objective. This can, for example, be the development of a new product at a company or a project at a research institute. In these contexts, the simulation work will inevitably involve people in your organization who uses other tools and software, and who may not have access to a COMSOL Multiphysics installation. An experimentalist may need to provide the simulation engineer with new experimental data or a CAD engineer may have updated a CAD geometry. The simulation engineer, in turn, may want to share simulation results in the form of animations, images, and plots. There will also be a need to manage various documents, presentations, notes, slides, and other supplementary files and metadata related to the simulation project.
Managing and sharing all this data can be done using a variety of tools: network file systems together with shared spreadsheets, custom intranet applications, commercial document management systems, project tracking software, or product lifecycle management (PLM) software. Depending on sophistication, these tools may support access control, auditing (who updated what and when), process and workflow management (state transitions), searching and filtering, and version control.
A Model Manager server installation includes a web-based system for managing simulation projects via assets. This asset management system forms a layer on top of the existing version control system for models and data files. You may think of an asset as a container for links to your model versions, data file versions, attached supplementary files, and various custom metadata fields. You can use the asset management system as either a standalone tool or as a subcomponent to existing systems within your organization — the existing systems could then, for example, contain web links to assets in the Model Manager server.
Assets are version controlled in their own right — every time you save changes to an asset, a new asset version is stored in the database. This enables you to both track changes made to assets over time, as well as revert such changes if need be. Storing links to your models together with supplementary files and metadata on assets also gives you a searchable archive of past and present projects — all while keeping everything in the same database as your models.
You can search assets on their linked model and file versions, attachments, and any metadata fields — either via full text search or by applying filters. This is true both for predefined fields common to all assets in a Model Manager server database, as well as for fields that you have added via customization.
The asset management system uses the same user management functionality available for models and data files. Each asset has an associated owner; each asset version has a record of the user that saved it. You grant permissions to users in order to control who has access to an asset. Assets can also be organized into libraries with individual access control settings.
The asset management system also gives you direct access to the version-controlled models and data files themselves directly from the web interface. You can search for versions using the same search functionality available in the COMSOL Desktop. You can also view the version history of these items, as well as browse their relationships. Finally, new versions of data files can be saved by uploading files directly from the web interface.
The combination of assets together with direct access to models and data files results in a powerful tool for collaboration. At the start of a simulation project, a new asset is created. By adding links to models, users can quickly navigate both to the models themselves, as well as to all input files that these models depend on, or all output files these models have generated. New input files for a simulation can be uploaded via the web interface; animations, images, plots, reports and other output files can be downloaded. Once the project is completed, the version controlled asset gives you a valuable historical record of how the project evolved from start to finish.