Wensheng Xu

A CAE-integrated distributed collaborative design system for finite element analysis of complex product based on SOOA

Large-scale finite element analysis of complex product needs a wider support from external CAE resources. This paper proposes a method of the distributed concurrent and collaborative design in the distributed intelligent resources environment to use Web-based extended manufacturing resources for product development. The CAE-integrated distributed collaborative design system architecture and enabling techniques are presented. Distributed CAE service resources on the Internet are achieved through Jini^T^M and service object-oriented architecture technologies. These CAE software tool resources are encapsulated as service providers in the system. A case study of railway bogie development is presented, and the Pro/E, HyperMesh, Ansys and HumanExpert service providers dynamically invoked and integrated as a temporary service federated environment with no need to know the exact location of a provider beforehand, flexibility can be well achieved, and collaborative design in the system can be implemented in the distributed dynamic environment. Compared with the traditional design system, some preliminary results indicate this architecture can shorten the cycle of service exchange, and strongly support concurrent and collaborative design of the complex product.

A Service Encapsulation Architecture for Engineering Software Based on SOOA

SOOA (Service object-oriented architecture) is suitable to construct the service sharing environment for engineering software on the dynamic network. After analyzing the service encapsulation requirements of engineering software, an SOOA-based service encapsulation architecture for engineering software (SooSEA) is proposed. In the developed SooSEA-based system, engineering software tools can be encapsulated as services by product developers without the need of programming, and the encapsulated services can be accessed and utilized through a standard Web browser. The efficient sharing of engineering software resources can be achieved in the dynamic network environment.

A Service Encapsulation Method in Cloud Simulation Platform

In a cloud simulation platform, there exist a large number of simulation software tools that need to be encapsulated as services that can be invoked conveniently when required in the product development process. An appropriate architecture for encapsulating and managing these software tools are needed to facilitate the management of these simulation resources. In this paper, the service object-oriented architecture (SOOA) is adopted to construct the service sharing environment for engineering software on the dynamic network, and the SOOA-based two-stage service encapsulation method for engineering software is proposed. With this method, simulation software tools can be encapsulated and deployed as services conveniently without the need of programming, and the encapsulated services can be invoked and accessed conveniently through a standard Web browser via the cloud simulation platform portal.

A resource integration platform for manufacturing grid based on SOOA

Most of the manufacturing grid systems are built on Web services technology. Basically speaking, they lack of the ability to handle the dynamic nature of network and manufacturing resources due to the static nature of service protocol-oriented architecture (SPOA) which Web services are built on. Recently, service object-oriented architecture (SOOA) which is suitable for constructing reliable distributed systems on the unstable Internet evolves rapidly from SPOA. In this paper, a resource integration platform for manufacturing grid (RIP-MG) is designed and implemented based on SOOA. In RIP-MG, an open template model (OTM) for encapsulating manufacturing resources is proposed, by which various manufacturing resources can be encapsulated as grid services conveniently without the need of programming, and the services can be deployed and managed locally by RIP-MG in remote service hosts. RIP-MG has been applied successfully in a collaborative design platform of manufacturing grid.

Research on Service Encapsulation of Engineering Software Based on Jini

In order to realize the effective sharing of resources of engineering software, a Jini-based method of service encapsulation of engineering software is proposed. The encapsulation templates including code template, configuration template and CLI (Command-Line Interface) template are constructed, and the process of service encapsulation of engineering software is discussed. A web-based system is developed to implement the proposed method. Engineers can encapsulate the engineering software as Jini-based engineering software services without the need of programming and can access the services through a standard Web browser. The sharing of resources of engineering software can be achieved. This method can also be used in the sharing of other resources on the dynamic network.

Organization and Interoperation of Engineering Design Services in Service-Oriented Architecture

Current CAD/CAE systems are not ideal for engineering design in distributed knowledge and intelligent resources. This paper investigates the approach of distributed collaborative design in service-oriented architecture. Service-ORiented Computing EnviRonment (SORCER) is employed to form a federation of distributed services that provide engineering data, applications and tools on a network. In order to implement interoperability between design services, standardized operation interface and design information transfer protocol should be developed for target domain. This paper introduces a standardized engineering layout design service interface to demonstrate the mechanism. We develop a flexible software architecture to organize services, to manage design process and to monitor design status in real time. This system aims to enable asynchronous distributed collaborative design with ease of alternative design services, reduced design cycles, and improved design resolution quality.

Integration of Privilege Management Infrastructure and Workflow Management Systems

Workflow management systems, especially web-based workflow management systems, have played an important role in concurrent engineering to support the management of dynamic product development processes over Internet. But most existing workflow systems, however, only provide limited security services such as authentication and authorization of users for workflow applications. A full-fledged flexible authorization scheme—Privilege Management Infrastructure (PMI) is still to be fully integrated with workflow management systems to enhance the security of the workflow applications. In this paper, the security weaknesses of the existing workflow management systems are first analyzed, then two different approaches to integrate PMI with workflow management systems are proposed, and workflow security policy enforcement in workflow systems is also analyzed.