DREAM: a problem solving environment for aeronautical industry

To allow applications such as interactive analysis and control of data production in a distributed computing environment, the client-server model has proved to be very effective for the development of sophisticated and specialized tools for the full exploitation of modern computing resources. Actual costs and performances make the development of such tools and computing environments both feasible and timely. We define a problem-solving environment (PSE), a system of computers and applications which provides all the computing facilities to solve a well-defined target class of problems. The two main goals for a PSE are, firstly, that they enable more people to solve more problems more rapidly, and, secondly, that they enable many people to do things that they could not otherwise do. Time is money, and since more people would be able to solve problems faster, successful PSEs could have an important economic impact. The DREAM (Dynamic Rotorcraft Evaluation by Advancing Modeling) project is aimed at defining the hardware and software technology necessary to achieve this impact in aeronautics by means of integrated efforts of different expertise. Different research groups cooperate in the project, which is funded and supervised by Agusta S.p.A.: Bologna University for the realization of the PSE, Politecnico di Milano for the dynamics system, Roma III University for the aerodynamics system, and the CIRA research center for the control system.