This blog article discusses the Siemens simulation tokens models. In Siemens world as well, a token is considered as a minimum sellable unit of the product the works on tokens scheme. Majority of simulation products in Siemens world are supported on tokens licensing. These include Simcenter 3D products as well as enterprise version of Nastran. As every underlying product consumes a minimum number of tokens, the product works when those number of tokens are available in license file.

Take an example: A customer has only 80 tokens in his license pool. He wants to submit a Nastran solution 101 job that consumes 100 tokens. Customer cannot get his job done without purchasing additional 20 tokens. However, the same tokens work for other Nastran solution sequences as well as other Siemens simulation products. Any product that works on tokens scheme and consumes less than or equal to 80 tokens would work with initial 80 tokens inventory. Its worth mention that these tokens are non-consumable form of license. Once job is done and application is closed, tokens return to token pool.

Take another example: A customer has 200 tokens. He wants to solve a job on Nastran multi step non-linear solution sequence 401 and further use the stress results from this job for fatigue analysis. Nastran solution 401 consumes 200 tokens without DMP and Simcenter 3D advanced durability consumes 100 tokens. One might think that minimum of 300 tokens are required to do this job. Sounds correct!! Not really.

I just mentioned that once any application is closed, the tokens pulled by that application return to the token pool. Durability is a sequential workflow in which stress analysis is followed by fatigue analysis. So instead of adding the tokens used by each application, one needs to look at the application that consumes maximum tokens. In this case it is Nastran multi step non-linear and that is why only 200 tokens are required for this workflow.

Now that we have done basics of tokens requirements in different scenarios, let us see in which scenarios token-based licensing is economical instead of products-based license. The image below is an answer to the question:

Lets say each of the DICE product offerings in image above cost $2000 and each of the product consumes 100 tokens. Cost of each token is $50. Customer has three workflows. The products associated with each workflow should work sequentially in same order.

Workflow 1: Dice video + Dice Resiliency

Workflow 2: Dice monitoring + Dice mobile + Dice comms

Workflow 3: All the six Dice products

Now let us look at products based vs. tokens based cost of each workflow.

	Product based cost	Tokens based cost
Workflow 1	$4000	$5000
Workflow 2	$6000	$5000
Workflow 3	$12000	$5000

The tokens based licensing model becomes economical as more number of products are involved in workflow. This is particularly in many common industrial applications that require many niche products such as Multiphysics simulations including FSI, composites design and manufacturing etc.

Its worth to mention in last that Siemens offers three different types of tokens for design, simulation and manufacturing applications. These three types of tokens are not interchangeable. It means that a simulation application can only use simulation token types and so on.