A Web Service Approach for Model Integration in Computational Design

Abstract

When today’s engineering design process involves information generated by a wide range of computational tools it is necessary to find tools and methods to integrate this information efficiently. Recent advances in the standardization of distributed application development give new potential to deal with this issue. The programming interfaces made available for this communication are referred to as Web Services and implies a straightforward way to exchange design data between engineers, simulation tools and other distributed information resources. The paper illustrates how simulation models and tools can be deployed as web services and how functionality and design data can be exchanged between these tools and accessed from standard desktop applications. An integration framework is presented where distributed services are integrated and the computational process is explicitly defined and executed. This model integration service also enables design optimization using the COMPLEX algorithm and Monte-Carlo simulation for probabilistic analysis of the design. The presented framework is built on open standards and gives new potential to already existing tools. By wrapping computational tools into a web service they can be integrated and accessed by any other application supporting web-service communication regardless of computer platform or operating system.

A variable-step interaction algorithm for multidisciplinary collaborative simulation

“…The design and development of advanced platforms and systems for integrating distributed simulation services has been studied by researchers [15,24,27,35,40] although much further research is still required. In the authors' opinion, four key issues are essential to the successful application of these systems, namely advanced visualization techniques and Web-based GUIs, a computational infrastructure, a high-level modeling scheme to describe complex systems at system levels and from different perspectives and a mechanism for the integration and collaboration of computational models.…”

“…Currently, a number of computational infrastructures have been developed and applied to distributed simulation, e.g. the Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) [27], the High Level Architecture (HLA) [7,35], and the more recent Web Services technology [7,15,35]. A comprehensive review of the methods and technologies for implementing Web-based distributed simulation is given in [7].…”

“…The HLA has an emphasis on the management of discrete event simulation and provides platform-independent rules, interfaces and data models for designing and developing distributed simulations [43]. Web Services technology provides platform-independent interfaces to improve the interoperability of applications on the Web [15]. Another approach to integrating distributed autonomous models is multi-agent technology which has been applied to the modeling and simulation of complex systems in engineering [28].…”

“…Current research on MCS is mainly focused on the development of models wrappers and computer systems [15,24,27,35,40] to implement MCS modeling and running in a distributed environment, with little work done on the improvement of simulation performance in terms of speed and accuracy. The data exchanged between computational models at runtime are generated in parallel from different numerical integration processes of the models involved, and, therefore, the exchange intervals, i.e.…”

A Simulation-as-a-Service Framework Facilitating Webgis Based Installation Planning

“…WBS is especially attractive in its capability for resource integration. A lot of works has been done in this area, including: implementing computation models as web services (Johansson, 2003), packaging DEVS resources into web services to promoting interactions, publishing general simulation models as services to support discrete event simulations (Gyimesi, 2008), and organizing computation services for task analysis (Wang, 2010;Senin, 2003).…”