Design and Manufacturing in a Distributed Computer Environment by Nicholas M. Patrikalakis, Kawasaki Professor of Engineering Chryssostomos Chryssostomidis, Doherty Professor of Ocean Science and Engineering Lieutenant Konstantinos Mihanetzis H.N. Massachusetts Institute of Technology Department of Ocean Engineering Invited Lecture at ICCAS ‘99 June 1999

OUR VISION The establishment of a global internet based information registry for expert knowledge, simulation and analysis tools and procedures for ship design and manufacturing in other words a virtual design and manufacturing marketplace.

VIRTUAL DESIGN AND MANUFACTURING MARKETPLACE “Our Visions begin with our desires” Andre Lorde With the expansion of the Internet and related distributed computing technologies, there are opportunities in moving from: Product-oriented computational environment for Design/Manufacturing to a Service-oriented computational environment for Design/Manufacturing building on concepts and methods of electronic commerce but adapted to the design/analysis/manufacturing enterprise.

PRODUCT-ORIENTED ENVIRONMENT Companies license specialized software for certain tasks in design/manufacture Train specialized operators at great expense and maintain local workforce. Execute engineering tasks with downloaded software in local environment

PRODUCT-ORIENTED ENVIRONMENT Communicate data and processes among different systems with difficulty/expense Create complex workflows conceptually and navigate through them manually

SERVICE-ORIENTED ENVIRONMENT Companies have access to computational services that other specialized companies sell via the Internet (e.g. design, analysis, process planning, simulation, etc) Engineers can link together complex computational processes from several service vendors to achieve a complex objective/overall goal. Gain from economies of scale on training and engineering specialization. Capitalize on the globalization of internet engineering services.

SERVICE ORIENTED ENGINEERING MARKETPLACE Premises/elements: Clients request services Service providers deliver engineering services Middleware provides the methods to link these together.

THE POSEIDON PROJECT A framework for testing concepts and ideas that will make various types of virtual marketplaces a reality.

OUR FIRST EXPERIMENT A scientific marketplace to facilitate modeling the ocean to enable scientists, policy makers and other users to evaluate the human/ocean interaction.

AN EXAMPLE A successful example of linking an Grids HOPS Poseidon Applet 2DColorContour Acoustic Code Initialization parameters Poseidon Applet Initialization Parameters A successful example of linking an acoustic, a physical oceanography and a visualization code, running on remote stations. Each piece of code used a custom build CORBA layer to establish communications with each other The client used a standard browser with Java capabilities and invoked the remote programs.

…AN EXAMPLE The user sends initialization parameters using a custom-build form. The applet sends the parameters to the appropriate remote objects, which communicate with each other and create the acoustic field in a matrix format. The applet receives the matrix and creates a 2D color contour of the acoustic field.

POSEIDON’S UNDERLYING TECHNOLOGIES Standardization in the computer industry Object Oriented (OO) software philosophy (concept of abstraction) Metadata. Data about data, or a standard way of describing digital information (data streams, pictures, video, etc).

...POSEIDON’S UNDERLYING TECHNOLOGIES The Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA). A “layer” that can be added to existing or new applications to enable communications between programs written in different languages and running on different operating systems. Java. A “write once run everywhere” technology that allows execution of code from standard browsers.

THE NEED FOR STANDARDS The industrial revolution was an example of a scaling process that created standards in order to succeed. The information revolution needs to build a standardized environment in order to reach it’s full potential. Standards Success

POSEIDON NETWORK ELEMENTS Clients request services Service providers deliver engineering/science services Middleware provides the methods to link these together. Client Service Provider Without Poseidon Middleware Client With Poseidon

THE EFFECT OF A STANDARDS BASED MIDDLEWARE Each Application Linked to the Middleware and through that to any other application Custom Link of Each Application to each other Applications Middleware CORBA, Metadata, STEP, etc

POSEIDON ELEMENTS Resource Registry: digital library of resources described via metadata Concept of metadata for data/software User Interface Model management system Metadata creation system Object wrappers Access to legacy resources providing services Authentication, accounting

DISTRIBUTED DESIGN AND MANUFACTURING Current approaches: Different applications for each task with various incompatibilities. Applications with multiple capabilities integrated from a single vendor. These lead to: Compromises on performances. Difficulties of integration of new applications.

...DISTRIBUTED DESIGN AND MANUFACTURING New generation distributed system vendors compete in selling specialized services to multiple clients. middleware companies provide the products to link together different applications. Poseidon is an example of a middleware system enabling distributed computing for Ocean Engineering.

RESEARCH ISSUES Metadata for data/software High level functional specification of workflow Software agents

METADATA FOR DATA AND SOFTWARE Metadata for data: abstract but standardized description of data to permit efficient search, retrieval, use Example: FGDC standard, STEP standard. Metadata for software: abstract but standardized description of application’s behavior and properties, input/output, range of validity, accuracy, performance requirements, memory requirements. Example: A seakeeping analysis program, a shape creation program Issues: How to express metadata for programs.

FUNCTIONAL SPECIFICATION OF WORKFLOWS Presently in Poseidon/other related system, user interface allows graphical specification of workflows via an editor requiring considerable knowledge of the underlying systems (at engineering level). With the new method, with a high level of functional specification using metadata we can automatically construct/validate/execute workflows and produce results for interpretation or decision support.

SOFTWARE AGENTS New technology for Internet and electronic commerce. Allow: Data mining. Optimal selection of resources/vendors from resource registries. Price negotiation. Product evaluation.

CONCLUSIONS New era of distributed computing environment New possibilities for service-oriented engineering Globalization and economies of scale, have the potential to lead to reconfiguration of how engineering design and manufacture are executed.