Grid-based Virtual Collaborative Facility: Concurrent and Collaborative Engineering for Space Projects

In the past decade, Concurrent Engineering approach has been demonstrated very favourable for the assessment and conceptual design of future space missions. At the same time, a remarkable increase in distributed and collaborative computing power has been achieved by designing and prototyping technologies thanks to the Grid technology. For this reason, the European Space Agency awarded a project called Grid-based Distributed Concurrent Design to study how to allow geographically distributed facilities to interact each other in real-time over wide area networks adopting the Grid technology for the purpose of space projects, to make the structure deployment reliable, cheap and compatible with Concurrent Facilities. This project resulted in a Virtual Collaborative Facility architecture to be taken as a reference step for a distributed concurrent and collaborative platform for the Space sector. Together with this, a tailored prototype was implemented and deployed to proof the concepts and the architecture according to two common scenarios in Space Projects.