1. Design and Manufacturing in a Distributed Computer Environmentby
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

2. 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.

3. 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.

4. 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

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

6. 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.

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

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

9. 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.

11. 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.

12. …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.

13. 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).

14. ...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.

15. 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

16. 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

17. 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

18. 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

19. 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.

20. ...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.

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

22. 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.

23. 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.

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

25. 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.