A communication model for structural design objects. I: Channels and medium

Design objects of integrated engineering systems frequently communicate data and information among each other. The data to be communicated is usually characterized by considerable variability in format and structure. This warrants the development of a uniform mechanism for communicating data and information among design objects. Recent advances in the object-oriented paradigm and the emerging agent-oriented paradigm gave promise to the development of such mechanism for inter-object communication that was difficult to achieve previously. This paper and its companion paper address this issue and propose an object communication model. Specifically, this paper identifies the communication channels among structural engineering design objects and proposes a communication medium based on messenger object for conveying message arguments and responses. The unified modeling language (UML) is used to present the model and its ingredients. A note on implementation of the messenger object, using C++ STL, is shown. Examples to demonstrate the capability of the communication model are presented. The proposed communication model will impose a uniform and consistent mechanism for communicating data and information among design objects. Other ingredients of the communication model such as performatives and protocols are addressed in the companion paper.