A Service-oriented Collaborative Design platform for Concurrent Engineering

An important requirement for a collaborative design platform in Concurrent Engineering (CE) is the integration of various engineering software tools and utilities in product design and development. Some CE platforms based on a client/server architecture or static Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) are available in the marketplace, but they lack flexibility and reliability in the constantly changing Internet environment due to the dynamic nature of the network. Based on the current development of SOA, this paper presents a Service-oriented Collaborative Design platform (SCoD) based on SORCER-a dynamic SOA infrastructure that allows federated integration of engineering software components in CE environments. The architecture of SCoD is proposed, the wrapping methodology used to integrate engineering software tools in SCoD is presented, and the federated method invocation for services in SCoD is described. With the support of SCoD, collaborative design in CE environments can be deployed, and scalability, reliability, and flexibility can be achieved in the changing Internet environment.