Using collaborative computing technologies to enable the sharing and integration of simulation services for product design

Nowadays simulation is commonly used in engineering design for verifying design concepts before physical prototypes are produced. The simulation of complex products such as mechatronics in general involves a synergy of multiple traditional disciplinary areas and entails the collaborative work of a multidisciplinary team. A need thus arises for supporting the effective and efficient integration of subsystem models at simulation runtime and in a distributed environment. These models are generally created using different simulation tools and depend on the inputs from each other to perform numerical integration. As such, many issues need to be addressed, e.g. system modeling, the use of computing technologies, and the runtime interaction between models. In this paper, a service-oriented paradigm is presented which is underpinned by collaborative computing technologies to enable the provision of simulation models as services as well as the integration of these services for performing simulation tasks in product design. As well as the implementation of such a paradigm, a method for the interaction between models is in particular developed to achieve high accuracy for the simulation of design problems involving the solving of system equations. Preliminary evaluation work shows that the proposed paradigm underpinned by collaborative computing technologies is viable and have great potential in supporting collaborative simulation development in industry and the method for interaction control successfully achieves better accuracy compared with traditional methods. (C) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.