Distributed routine design over the Internet with cooperating MDM agents.

摘要

The availability of reliable, high-speed electronic connectivity enabled collaborative design teams function irrespective of physical distance. But the advent of the Internet has not as yet given rise to a simulation environment that leverages the inherent advantages offered while observing basic constraints imposed by the current wired world, most notably practical limitations on the amount of network traffic. The changes in the procurement process of enterprises need to be reflected in a new type of design and simulation environment---one that facilitates automated searching and locating of satisfying and optimizing parts, integration of selected parts in an assembly, and simulation of the overall design that is distributed over the Internet.; Our goal is to develop an automated and distributed scheme for design and simulation of engineering artifacts, in the context of open and competitive e-commerce. With the realization of our goal, designers will be able to automatically incorporate distributed off-the-shelf parts into their designs, simulate them as integrated components of the end product, and make their final designs available to prospective buyers without disclosing proprietary information.; In this dissertation we describe a conceptual framework and implementation that supports task directed, distributed Multiple Routine Design augmented with simulation-based design testing. In our research, we leverage the Modular Distributed Modeling (MDM) methodology to simulate the interaction of design components in a distributed assembly. The major extension we have made to the overall methodology of Routine Design is to extend it with the capabilities of incorporating remotely represented off-the-shelf components in design and simulation based testing of a distributed assembly. The deliverable of our research is a conceptual framework and implementation of a distributed multiple routine design platform (RD-MDM) that is capable of automated multi-attribute search for remotely represented off-the-shelf design components, design parameterization by choosing suitable components for the design, integrating these components in an assembly, running simulations for testing the total design, and publishing the approved design as an MDM agent.