Multi-Granularity Modeling of virtual prototyping in collaborative product design

Virtual Prototyping widely used in complex product development is concerned with collaboration of multidiscipline and cooperation between several development stages, such as requirement analysis, conceptual design, detail design and engineering design. To reduce the complexity and time span of virtual prototype modeling, an innovative kind of Multi-Granularity Modeling (MGM) Framework which gives solutions of inheritance and implementation problems of multi-phase modeling is proposed. In our method which introduces the concept of Granularity Model (GM) and its decomposition and evolvement specifications, key model information can extend automatically across multiple granularity models in different stages. A high-level software specification that illustrates an implementation in collaborative product design of this framework is described. Finally, the framework is exemplified via an attacking system which adopts multi-granularity modeling methods with UML (Unified Modeling Language) profile and middleware based on XML (eXtensible Markup Language).