A distributed and interactive system to integrated design and simulation for collaborative product development

The goal of applying collaborative product development in industry has raised the need to develop software tools supporting system integration and group collaboration. Current methods and tools mainly focus on the collaborative creation of design components and assemblies. However, few of them support the collaborative work in developing simulation models so that proposed design concepts and solutions can be evaluated by integrating expertise from several disciplines. The purpose of this research is to develop a distributed and interactive system on which designers and experts can work together to create, integrate and run simulations for engineering design. To develop such a system, a number of issues, e.g. effectiveness and efficiency of modeling work, the re-use of models, interaction and cooperation, accuracy of simulation, collaborative operation on models, etc., need to be addressed. This paper describes an open architecture to developing simulations for engineering design in a distributed and collaborative environment, identifies a set of key issues raised in this architecture, and presents the techniques employed in our solution.