Collaborative system engineering and integration environments

System engineering of complex systems requires more “infrastructure” than conventional programs; it must flexibly integrate multiple tools, databases, and other programs. Experience with the VEHICLES system, a large computing environment that supports conceptual design of space systems, has led us to new infrastructure notions about heterogeneous software environments. The “wrapping” approach to engineering complex software environments is based on machine processable descriptions of all computational resources. The descriptions include protocol and data requirements for applying a resource, but also meta knowledge about appropriate contexts for applying and adapting the resource to different problems. This approach makes sharing of development artifacts quite natural. We believe it substantially advances the state of the art in computer support of collaborative system engineering