SODA: service oriented design activities

This work presents a new approach towards design activities that require collaborative work among diverse design disciplines and autonomous organisations each providing specialised services. This approach is called SODA (Service Oriented Design Activities), which provides a Web-based design infrastructure that allows loosely coupled design teams to collaborate on different services. SODA is based on the paradigm of service-oriented computing of Web services and semantic Web. It provides interoperability among distributed design services and also represents their knowledge in order to aid the understanding of data and functions of design services. Validation of SODA is performed through the development of a prototype tool and its application to a real life case study of ship design. Advantages of SODA include interoperability and knowledge sharing of design services and the consequentially improvement of designer capabilities, reduction of product development time, and achievement of higher-level product quality.