Geographically distributed engineers must collaboratively develop, build and test solutions to design-manufacture problems to be competitive in the global marketplace. Engineers operate in a distributed system in which separate entities communicate cooperatively - ideas and information requests are generated anywhere within the system, rapid turn-around is essential, and multiple projects must be handled simultaneously. In this paper we present a prototype platform-independent framework to integrate distributed and heterogeneous software resources to support the computationally intensive activities in the product realization process. This framework, PRE-RMI, is based on an experimental event-based communications model; it has been coded in Java and uses the RMI messaging system. We describe its usage in a distributed product realization environment, the Rapid Tooling TestBed. PRE-RMI is compared to a previous environment, called P2 that was based on Java Servlet technology. PRE-RMI is adaptable to different design processes, is modular and extensible, is robust to network and computing failures, and is far preferable to P2. Further, we demonstrate the successful integration of CAD, CAE, design, and manufacturing software tools and resources in this flexible distributed computing environment.
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