Design and Manufacturing in a Distributed Computer Environment

1
Design and Manufacturing in a Distributed
Computer Environment

• by
• Nicholas M. Patrikalakis, Kawasaki Professor of
  Engineering
• Chryssostomos Chryssostomidis, Doherty Professor
  of Ocean Science and Engineering
• Lieutenant Konstantinos Mihanetzis H.N.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology Department
of Ocean Engineering Invited Lecture at ICCAS
99 June 1999
2
OUR VISION
The establishment of a global internet based
information registry for expert knowledge,
simulation and analysis tools and procedures for
ship design and manufacturing in other words a
virtual design and manufacturing marketplace.
3
VIRTUAL DESIGN AND MANUFACTURING MARKETPLACE
Our Visions begin with our desires Andre
Lorde
With the expansion of the Internet and related
distributed computing technologies, there are
opportunities in moving from

• Product-oriented computational environment for
  Design/Manufacturing to a
• Service-oriented computational environment for
  Design/Manufacturing

building on concepts and methods of electronic
commerce but adapted to the design/analysis/manufa
cturing enterprise.
4
PRODUCT-ORIENTED ENVIRONMENT

• Companies license specialized software for
  certain tasks in design/manufacture
• Train specialized operators at great expense and
  maintain local workforce.
• Execute engineering tasks with downloaded
  software in local environment

5
PRODUCT-ORIENTED ENVIRONMENT

• Communicate data and processes among different
  systems with difficulty/expense
• Create complex workflows conceptually and
  navigate through them manually

6
SERVICE-ORIENTED ENVIRONMENT

• Companies have access to computational services
  that other specialized companies sell via the
  Internet (e.g. design, analysis, process
  planning, simulation, etc)
• Engineers can link together complex computational
  processes from several service vendors to achieve
  a complex objective/overall goal.
• Gain from economies of scale on training and
  engineering specialization.
• Capitalize on the globalization of internet
  engineering services.

7
SERVICE ORIENTED ENGINEERING MARKETPLACE

• Premises/elements
• Clients request services
• Service providers deliver engineering services
• Middleware provides the methods to link these
  together.

8
THE POSEIDON PROJECT
A framework for testing concepts and ideas that
will make various types of virtual marketplaces a
reality.
9
OUR FIRST EXPERIMENT
A scientific marketplace to facilitate modeling
the ocean to enable scientists, policy makers and
other users to evaluate the human/ocean
interaction.
10
(No Transcript)
11
AN EXAMPLE
A successful example of linking an acoustic, a
physical oceanography and a visualization code,
running on remote stations.
Each piece of code used a custom build CORBA
layer to establish communications with each
other The client used a standard browser with
Java capabilities and invoked the remote
programs.
12
AN EXAMPLE

• The user sends initialization parameters using
  a custom-build form.
• The applet sends the parameters to the
  appropriate remote objects, which communicate
  with each other and create the acoustic field
  in a matrix format.
• The applet receives the matrix and creates a 2D
  color contour of the acoustic field.

13
POSEIDONS UNDERLYING TECHNOLOGIES

• Standardization in the computer industry
• Object Oriented (OO) software philosophy (concept
  of abstraction)
• Metadata. Data about data, or a standard way of
  describing digital information (data streams,
  pictures, video, etc).

14
...POSEIDONS UNDERLYING TECHNOLOGIES

• The Common Object Request Broker Architecture
  (CORBA). A layer that can be added to existing
  or new applications to enable communications
  between programs written in different languages
  and running on different operating systems.
• Java. A write once run everywhere technology
  that allows execution of code from standard
  browsers.

15
THE NEED FOR STANDARDS

• The industrial revolution was an example of a
  scaling process that created standards in order
  to succeed.
• The information revolution needs to build a
  standardized environment in order to reach its
  full potential.

Standards
Success
16
POSEIDON NETWORK ELEMENTS

• Clients request services
• Service providers deliver engineering/science
  services
• Middleware provides the methods to link these
  together.

17
THE EFFECT OF A STANDARDS BASED MIDDLEWARE
Each Application Linked to the Middleware and
through that to any other application
Custom Link of Each Application to each other
Applications
Middleware
CORBA, Metadata, STEP, etc
18
POSEIDON ELEMENTS

• Resource Registry digital library of resources
  described via metadata
• Concept of metadata for data/software
• User Interface
• Model management system
• Metadata creation system
• Object wrappers
• Access to legacy resources providing services
• Authentication, accounting

19
DISTRIBUTED DESIGN AND MANUFACTURING

• Current approaches
• Different applications for each task with various
  incompatibilities.
• Applications with multiple capabilities
  integrated from a single vendor.
• These lead to
• Compromises on performances.
• Difficulties of integration of new applications.

20
...DISTRIBUTED DESIGN AND MANUFACTURING

• New generation distributed system
• vendors compete in selling specialized services
  to multiple clients.
• middleware companies provide the products to link
  together different applications.
• Poseidon is an example of a middleware system
  enabling distributed computing for Ocean
  Engineering.

21
RESEARCH ISSUES

• Metadata for data/software
• High level functional specification of workflow
• Software agents

22
METADATA FOR DATA AND SOFTWARE

• Metadata for data abstract but standardized
  description of data to permit efficient search,
  retrieval, use
• Example FGDC standard, STEP standard.
• Metadata for software abstract but standardized
  description of applications behavior
  and properties, input/output, range of
  validity, accuracy, performance
  requirements, memory requirements.
• Example A seakeeping analysis program, a shape
  creation program
• Issues How to express metadata for programs.

23
FUNCTIONAL SPECIFICATION OF WORKFLOWS

• Presently in Poseidon/other related system, user
  interface allows graphical specification of
  workflows via an editor requiring considerable
  knowledge of the underlying systems (at
  engineering level).
• With the new method, with a high level of
  functional specification using metadata we can
  automatically construct/validate/execute
  workflows and produce results for interpretation
  or decision support.

24
SOFTWARE AGENTS

• New technology for Internet and electronic
  commerce.
• Allow
• Data mining.
• Optimal selection of resources/vendors from
  resource registries.
• Price negotiation.
• Product evaluation.

25
CONCLUSIONS

• New era of distributed computing environment
• New possibilities for service-oriented
  engineering
• Globalization and economies of scale, have the
  potential to lead to reconfiguration of how
  engineering design and manufacture are executed.