A WEB SERVICE APPROACH FOR MODEL INTEGRATION IN COMPUTATIONAL DESIGN

摘要

When today's engineering design process involves information generated by a wide range of computational tools it is necessary to find tools and methods to integrate this information efficiently. Recent advances in the standardization of distributed application development give new potential to deal with this issue. The programming interfaces made available for this communication are referred to as Web Sei-vices and implies a straightforward way to exchange design data between engineers, simulation tools and other distributed information resources. The paper illustrates how simulation models and tools can be deployed as web services and how functionality and design data can be exchanged between these tools and accessed from standard desktop applications. An integration framework is presented where distributed services are integrated and the computational process is explicitly defined and executed. This model integration service also enables design optimization using the COMPLEX algorithm and Monte-Carlo simulation for probabilistic analysis of the design. The presented framework is built on open standards and gives new potential to already existing tools. By wrapping computational tools into a web service they can be integrated and accessed by any other application supporting web-service communication regardless of computer platform or operating system.