A remote CAE collaborative design system for complex product based on design resource unit

Globally distributed design, analysis, manufacturing, and marketing facilities take competitive advantages of technology, natural resources, and human resources around the world. While large-scale finite element analysis of complex product needs a wider support from external computer-aided engineering (CAE) resources. Based on the typology of design decomposition, this paper first presents the approach of design resource unit (DRU). In the networked distributed collaborative development environment, those distributed, replaceable, and reusable DRUs can dynamically form the temporary exertion federation environment when receiving a DRU requestor. A remote CAE collaborative design system architecture is then proposed, in which CAE is recognized as an exertion and the method of exertion-oriented programming is applied. Derived from the approach of architecture-based component composition (ABC), the DRU design agent is developed. The DRU design agent has two important features: one is to know how to find other agents, another is robustness. Both of the two features can eliminate the communication overheads of the DRU design agent. The CAE-DRUs will be applied to a number of real products including railway bogie, automobile parts, etc. The applications demonstrate that the ABC-based CAE-DRUs are practical and ubiquitous for networked product development.