Interdisciplinary Distributed Collaborative Design

Vision

Advances in distributed collaborative computing can be expected to have a profound effect for many aspects of Engineering. In particular we can expect growing use of interdisciplinary approaches which macroscopically link product definition, (conceptual, preliminary and detailed) design, manufacturing (including both process and costing), and product support. At a more refined level, we expect areas such as structures, fluid flow, acoustics and environmental impact to be linked in design process. We can expect that the USA can translate its leadership in information technologies to a new leadership in manufacturing by development and adoption of distributed collaborative computing into the Engineering process. For DoD, we can expect additional benefits from greater use of such information technologies as it will allow rapid customization of civilian product designs to military use and so better realize the advantage of COTS. NPAC is well placed to work in this area as it is a leader in relevant distributed collaboration technologies but has also been involved in multidisciplinary analysis for some time. In particular Fox was PI of a major NASA funded academic-industry study on the NII requirements for this field. (http://www.npac.syr.edu/users/gcf/ASOPreport/ASOPRQD2.html).

Our research builds on CRPC (Rice) involvement in novel optimization strategies for MDO (Multidisciplinary Design Optimization). There is also significant interest from the Syracuse College of Engineering and Computer Science in this area.

Project Description

We suggest a sequence of modest projects to investigate some key concepts that are required by our vision. As our initial project, we suggest the linkage of standard design programs including AUTOCAD with TANGO. This will allow sharing of designs and collaboration using the other capabilities of TANGO. Although AUTOCAD has a well defined API, we do not know if this is true for other programs of interest to CEWES. Further there are various other important issues that need discussion and further study. These concern aspects of the Web linkage of design tools (which could be usefully joined to VRML2 viewers, whiteboard and computing technologies such as WebFlow) and the nature of collaborative engineering enabled by our initial prototypes. Another major area of possible projects is the linkage of distributed database and compute facilities implied by the vision. Our WebFlow technology (which can be naturally linked to TANGO as both are Web Server based) has been designed for the coarse grained metacomputing needed by multidisciplinary collaborative design. So we suggest that the first implementation project be accompanied by a planning process that would help plan future activities.

Deliverables

• The initial deliverable would be the linkage of TANGO to a design system such as AUTOCAD. This would be accompanied by an assessment phase which would probably require iterative changes to the system based on user feedback. This task would be 6 months in length including assessment.
• The second deliverable would be an analysis of Web computing and collaborative technologies for Interdisciplinary Distributed Collaborative Design taking into account some of the issues discussed above. We suggest that this planning process would be ongoing through out the year but have initial deliverables after 4 and 6 months.
• Based on results of the above two projects, we would expect to able to work with CEWES to define further short term (6 month) projects to continue this work.