You can execute the coupled analysis interactively in Abaqus/CAE as described in “Understanding co-executions,” Section 19.4 of the Abaqus/CAE User's Guide. You are not required to create a configuration file; Abaqus/CAE creates the file automatically.

You execute the Abaqus jobs as described in “Abaqus/Standard, Abaqus/Explicit, Abaqus/CFD, AND FMU co-simulation execution,” Section 3.2.4.

abaqus cosimulation cosimjob=beam job=job-1,job-2
configure=config

The timeout execution parameter specifies the amount of time in seconds that each analysis waits to receive the co-simulation message expected from the other analysis that is running. The default timeout value is 60 minutes when submitting jobs using the command line options and 10 minutes when executing the jobs in Abaqus/CAE. When the timeout period is large compared to typical analysis increment wallclock times, you have greater flexibility in starting jobs and performing operations that precede the co-simulation analysis step. Examples where this flexibility is needed include: job submission using queues, analyses where steps that precede the co-simulation step have long run times, and cases where one job is resubmitted because of an input error. However, a large timeout period can cause problems when one of the co-simulation jobs fails (for reasons such as convergence issues or availability of computer resources) before the initial co-simulation communication is established. In these cases you may prefer to terminate the job left running rather than have it wait the entire timeout period.