The BROADEN distributed tool, service and data architecture

The organisation of much industrial and scientific work involves the geographically distributed utilisation of multiple tools, services and (increasingly) distributed data. A generic Distributed Tool, Service and Data Architecture is described together with its application to the aero-engine domain through the BROADEN project. A central issue in the work is the ability to provide a flexible platform where data intensive services may be added with little overhead from existing tool and service vendors. The paper explains the issues surrounding this and explains how the project is investigating the PMC method (developed in DAME) and the use of Enterprise Service Bus to over come the problems. The mapping of the generic architecture to the BROADEN application (visualisation tools and distributed data and services) is described together with future work.