A Multidisciplinary Collaborative Design System in a Distributed Environment

The development of complex product is essentially concerned with multidisciplinary knowledge and requires computer supported cooperation among the designers. A multidisciplinary collaborative modeling and simulation (M&S) technology is an effective approach for the design and development of the complex product. The challenge now faced is how to apply the multidisciplinary M&S in the systematic level of complex product development. The key issue is how to integrate the heterogeneous, autonomous software tools in a distributed environment. In this paper, we propose a high level architecture (HLA) and web services based framework for multidisciplinary collaborative design in a distributed environment. The process of multidisciplinary collaborative design project is principally analyzed. A modeling and simulation platform with the focus of multidisciplinary collaborative design is present. Besides its key technologies of HLA and web services based integration are studied. The interoperability issue to this research is also discussed.