A Service-Oriented Architecture framework for the distributed concurrent and collaborative design

The independent development capabilities of the new products reflect the core competitiveness of enterprises. The concurrent and collaborative design for complex product is a new mode of design based on concurrent engineering and multidisciplinary collaborative design, using various fields of CAX/DFx. At present, the most advanced collaborative work technology is based on the Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA). According to the theory of concurrent engineering and the optimization theory in the multidisciplinary collaborative design, the paper defines the concept of DCCD-distributed concurrent and collaborative design. Based on SOA and the distributed services environment, this paper first presents a novel distributed concurrent and collaborative design platform architecture. The architecture integrates some Large-scale commercial engineering softwares (such as Pro/E, HaperMesh and ANSYS) to quickly accomplish the design and analysis of complex product. Using the java programming language, this paper defines the interface description of the services and gives detailed introductions to the architecture by a demonstration of railway bogie. Compared with the traditional collaborative design platform, this architecture can shorten the cycle of service exchange, and strongly support concurrent and collaborative design for the complex product.