Investigation of a framework for collaborative activities across heterogeneous engineering domains

This paper describes the functions underlying the creation of a collaborative framework to support robust information exchange across heterogeneous engineering domains. The application context relates to nano manipulation of particles such as proteins; the initial findings relating to distributed accomplishment of target activities in this identified context will be elaborated in this paper. In the scenario being considered, the potential project partners who possess skills and resources related to nano tube design, synthesis, manipulation plan, and simulation are identified from a service directory to form a Virtual Enterprise, with which the final target physical manipulation is formulated. In the proposed framework, the user specifications are used by various planning activities and a detailed top level plan is generated, which is represented by < NTDS, NTSS, MPS, SS >, where NTDS (Nano Tube Design Specification) is a representation of the design attributes of a carbon nano tube, NTSS (Nano Tube Synthesis Specification) is a representation that describes the synthesis of nano tube depending upon the design specification, MPS (Manipulation Plan Specification) is a representation which allows to formulate a nano manipulation plan according to user specification, and SS (Simulation Specification) is a representation that allows to generate various test cases to evaluate the nanomanipulator and the associated manipulation plan. The proposed framework is composed of an enterprise level Planning Manager (which generates a detailed top level plan from the user specification), a Design Coordinator (that identifies and evaluates the candidate design companies to find a potential design that can be used for a target nano manipulation tasks), a Synthesis/Manufacturing Coordinator (which focuses on identifying candidate partners and resources capable of manufacturing a specified nano manipulator). In the modeled context, this manipulator is a Nano tube attached to the tip of Atomic Force Microscope (AFM) probe; a Manipulation Plan Coordinator focuses on identifying candidate manipulation plan generators, and a Simulation coordinator deals with identifying candidate simulation tool vendors who provide services to evaluate nano tube and nano manipulation plan. The framework is proposed with scalability in mind so that new modules can be support a 'plug and play' type of integration in depending on the customer requirements.