An integrated and collaborative approach for complex product development in distributed heterogeneous environment

Multidisciplinary collaborative modeling and simulation is an effective approach to verify the dynamic behaviour of a complex product such as an aerospace vehicle or a locomotive. The design environment of such products must cater for the requirement for geographical distribution and structural heterogeneity in the modern industrial context. The focus of our research is a solution for such a collaborative modeling and simulation environment. Our approach is to utilize the IEEE standard High Level Architecture for distributed simultaneous simulation execution and management. At the same time, Web services technology is employed to deploy and integrate functional models for the simulation. The method for model description in this framework is proposed. The techniques for simulation execution and service encapsulation are discussed. A prototype system is implemented and a case study of locomotive tilting component design is executed. We find that both High Level Architecture and Web services have their expertise for collaborative simulation and the integration of these two technologies does achieve better interoperability and reusability among heterogeneous simulation components in a distributed environment. The new approach has considerable promise for the efficient and successful complex product design.