Just recently I read an article on Scientific Computing World about Maplesoft and Toyota have founded a partnership to develop symbolic computational tools for the automotive industry.

Before getting into the details, I’d like to provide some background information on the two companies and what symbolic computation is to our readers. As we all know Toyota is a multinational corporation headquartered in Japan; it is also the biggest automaker in the world. Maplesoft is also known as Waterloo Maple Inc; its main product is Maple, a commercial mathematics software package.  Symbolic computation, as another blogger (MC Hammer’s Cardboard Box) has written in his/her post,  “can really represent a number to infinite precision with very little memory usage. It does this by storing numbers using their symbolic representation, ex. pi*sin(3) is actually stored using the symbols pi, sin, and 3 and not the floating point approximation. Symbolic computation is mainly used for operations such as integration, differentiation, polynomial arithmetic, and simplification of algebraic expressions which intuitively makes sense because these operations all involve directly manipulating the actual symbols in the expression. “

The consortium hopes to develop a new mathematical tool that will be faster and more efficient on performing automotive simulations.

Normally, those automotive simulations contain thousands of equations that describe the physics governing the performance and interactions of the component. We can imagine it will take a lot of time to solve those equations.  But sometimes, the set of equations can be reduced to a smaller set, which requires much less time to solve. However, now there doesn’t exist a tool that’ll deal with simplification in all cases. So the goal of the consortium is to develop a mathematical tool that can be applied in simplifying all equations in automotive simulation.

According to Laurent Bernardin, VP of R&D at Maplesoft, though techniques for symbolic computation have been around for some time, not until recently did people recognize its value in automotive industry.  

Since the project is still a work in process, not too much information on how it’ll be done is revealed in the article. But I believe with the automobile giant’s influence and the leading mathematical software company’s brain power, something great will definitely be done.

Reference:

Maplesoft founds physical modeling think-tank

http://www.scientific-computing.com/news/news_story.php?news_id=312

MC Hammer’s Cardboard Box’s post on Arbitrary Precision Arithmetic

http://expertvoices.nsdl.org/cornell-cs322/2008/03/06/arbitrary-precision-arithmetic/