A Service-Oriented Approach for the Collaborative Simulation of Complex Engineering Systems

The design and development of complex engineering systems generally encompasses multi-disciplinary knowledge and entails systematic analysis at an early design stage. A paradigm known as collaborative simulation is introduced to address this characteristic: that is, decomposing the system into manageable subsystems and incorporating them at simulation run-time. However, many key limitations still remain in current collaborative simulation solutions, especially in the modern context of distributive and collaborative design. Our motivation in this research is to develop such a tool that can support the effective deployment and dynamic integration of simulation models distributed on the Internet. As a major implementation technology in industry, Web services have advantages such as modularized system structure and universally available computing capability. We propose a service-oriented approach that treats a collaborative simulation system as loosely-coupled components, e.g. simulation models and simulation management, all of which are wrapped as independent Web services. A prototype system is developed, based on which a simple case study is looked at. It is evidenced in this work that Web services and service-oriented architecture have great potential in developing engineering software tools.