Supporting collaborative engineering using an intelligent web service middleware

doi:10.1016/j.aei.2008.05.002

Advanced Engineering Informatics

Volume 22, Issue 4, October 2008, Pages 431-437

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.aei.2008.05.002 Get rights and content

Abstract

Collaborative Engineering tasks are difficult to manage and involve a high amount of risk – as such, these tasks generally involve only well-known pre-established relationships. Such collaborations are generally quite static and do not allow for dynamic reactions to changes in the environment. Furthermore, not all optimal resource providers can be utilised for the respective tasks as they are potentially unknown. The TrustCoM project elaborated the means to create and manage Virtual Organisations in a trusted and secure manner integrating different providers on-demand. However, TrustCoM focused more on the VO than on the participant, whereas the BREIN project is now enhancing the intelligence of such VO systems to support even providers with little business expertise and provide them with capabilities to optimise their performance. This paper analyses the capabilities of current VO frameworks on the example of TrustCoM and identifies the gaps from the participant’s perspective. It then shows how BREIN addresses these gaps.

Introduction

Modern day engineering tasks typically demand a complexity not supported by individual companies – accordingly, enterprises join in collaborations to outsource and distribute tasks according to the requirements that need to be fulfilled. Whilst the overall costs are reduced this way, such collaborations are normally difficult to manage considering their size and complexity [10].

In recent years, the concept of Virtual Organisations has been developed to describe collaborations using resources exposed to the internet. Following the grid concept, this allows for managed and dynamic collaboration between different resource types, or in other words to enable transactions between different companies in a coordinated manner [7], [8], [9].

The TrustCoM project has delivered a framework, as well as a reference implementation that enables organised and contract managed collaborations in a secure and trusted manner. Even though TrustCoM principally allows for dynamic on-demand creation of Virtual Organisations, as well as their autonomous management according to predefined collaboration description, the project does not support all issues to ensure full uptake by the eBusiness community.

This paper examines TrustCoM in view of one of its particular application scenarios, namely the “CE scenario”, in which different companies participate in a Virtual Organisation to adapt the design of an airplane according to a specific customer’s personal requirements. Basing on this scenario, we will examine in how far TrustCoM actually supports the individual participants in their task of supporting the VO requirements and thereupon elaborate the gaps that the recently started IP project BREIN is addressing.

Section snippets

An assured environment for collaborative engineering: The TrustCoM approach

The main goal of the TrustCoM project consisted in providing a framework that would allow integration of any type of resource provider exposing their capabilities over the web, in order to form collaborations that meet specific business needs and goals. The framework makes extensive use of web service standards so as to allow common uptake from both larger and smaller companies, respectively individuals.

The framework ensures that all transactions within the Virtual Organisation are secured and

Applying virtual organisations: The collaborative engineering scenario

It has already been noted that TrustCoM specifically aimed at simplifying the overall processes in a complex distributed engineering task, as represented by British Aerospace. This particular application scenario consisted in an engineering consortium (here “CE VO”) collaborating with a team of airplane analysts (“Analysis VO”) to support the tasks of an airline manufacturer that e.g. wants to extend the capabilities of an airplane to host internet capabilities on-flight to fulfil customer

Ready for eBusiness 2010?

The TrustCoM project provides all the relevant features to relieve business providers from the burden of complex and in particular costly adaptations of the infrastructure so as to meet individual customer’s demands whilst maintaining security and access right restrictions. It also ensures that dynamicity is ensured without impact on the individual participants and that the risk of participation is reduced through means of contractual binding, sensible responsibility distribution and SLA

Filling in the gaps: The BREIN approach

Whilst TrustCoM significantly reduced the complexity of managing and maintaining distributed collaborative tasks, it still requires a high degree of technical understanding of the individual parties wanting to participate in such collaborations, respectively wanting to expose TrustCoM-conformant services. The BREIN project is loosely coupled to TrustCoM and extends the achievements of the latter with a particular focus on the human behind the system. It pursues three main goals:

•
Supporting the

Comparison between VO middlewares

It has been noted that TrustCoM and BREIN, non-regarding their similarities in the overall approach, show some fundamental differences in capabilities and specific focus points. Obviously, TrustCoM and BREIN are not the only projects addressing virtual collaborations – be it for engineering tasks or for distributed process execution. This section gives a short overview over the development of Grid/VO support in order to highlight the pros and cons of the discussed middleware and as such does

Conclusion

This paper has shown that the Collaborative Engineering scenarios can gain much from the current progress being made in Virtual Organisation research: not only does it allow to reduce risk and adaptation cost, it also allows more flexibility and easier integration into collaborations.

Great progress has been made over recent years to achieve the goal of a business-driven support for (electronic) virtual collaborations by such projects like TrustCoM which furthermore laid the basis for

Acknowledgement

The work reported in this paper has been partially funded by the EC through a FW6 IST programme grant to the TrustCoM integrated project under Contract Number 01945. The project partners, who have all contributed to the work reported in the paper, are: Atos Origin, BAE Systems, BT, IBM, Microsoft, SAP, CCLRC, ETH, HLRS, SICS, SINTEF, and the universities of Kent, London (Imperial and King’s colleges), Milan and Oslo.

This work has been supported by the BREIN project (//www.gridsforbusiness.eu

Lutz Schubert has been working on dynamic infrastructures for Virtual Organisations for more than 3 years now. He has a strong research and study background in artificial intelligence and neural networks, and is currently looking at enhancing the Web Service paradigm with intelligent capabilities. He has recently become head of the “Intelligent Service Infrastructure” group at HLRS which is realising intelligent services for the future internet.

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Advanced Engineering Informatics

Supporting collaborative engineering using an intelligent web service middleware

Abstract

Introduction

Section snippets

An assured environment for collaborative engineering: The TrustCoM approach

Applying virtual organisations: The collaborative engineering scenario

Ready for eBusiness 2010?

Filling in the gaps: The BREIN approach

Comparison between VO middlewares

Conclusion

Acknowledgement

A model for virtual organisation: a structure and process perspective

Electronic Journal of Organizational Virtualness

Contractual frameworks for enterprise networks and virtual organisations in e-learning

Private business infrastructures in a VO environment

The grid for e-collaboration and virtual organisations

Building the Knowledge Economy: eChallenges 2003

Secure and Dynamic Virtual Organizations for Business

Planning-based semantic web service composition in factory automation

Knowledge product modelling for industry: The PROMOTE approach

Intelligent decision support for structural design analysis

Trust factors influencing the adoption of internet-based interorganizational systems

Grid-based collaborative simulation system for vehicle crashworthiness

Towards a collaborative modeling and simulation platform on the Internet