Interface for Multidisciplinary Virtual Prototype Components

Computer-based concurrent engineering of products, denoted as virtual engineering (VE), is used extensively to meet the requirements of product development. Current research deals with database systems to store product libraries, process information, and dependencies between domain models. To enhance the information transfer between domains a multidisciplinary component structure is essential. The component-oriented model approach has to be improved by flexible interfaces which support a consistency control of model information for multi-domain models, simplified assembling of complex products based on standard libraries, and retrievable information over the complete VE-process. This paper aims to identify challenges and solutions of a domain independent interface structure to integrate information from heterogeneous libraries in a multidisciplinary component interface.