A study on the run-time interaction between distributed computational models in multidisciplinary collaborative simulation

Simulation technology is widely applied in product development to make forecasts on the performance of design solutions for which it is difficult or not economical to develop physical prototypes. There are some circumstances, e.g. the development of mechatronic products, under which a number of simulations need to be used together. Therefore, it is necessary to develop a collaborative simulation platform which enables design engineers in a multidisciplinary team to develop, share, reuse, and integrate computational models. Difficulties in developing such a platform include using multiple simulation tools, the runtime integration of distributed models, the sharing of proprietary information, etc. Among these difficulties, run-time integration of distributed models is the one significantly affecting the accuracy, efficiency and stability of a simulation. This paper describes how multidisciplinary collaborative simulation problem can be solved, discusses different methods for run-time interaction, and presents a novel method that is proposed and implemented in a prototype system for collaborative simulation. Further evaluation on these methods shows that the novel method has better performance in terms of both accuracy and efficiency.