An e-Engineering framework based on service-oriented architecture and agent technologies

This paper presents an ongoing project on the development of an e-Engineering framework proposed by KIMM (Korea Institute of Machinery and Materials). The framework aims to provide an integrated engineering environment to support collaborating and integrating personnel, design/modelling/simulation activities and engineering resources in the product development process. Integration of the distributed engineering resources and orchestration of engineering activities have been recognized as crucial issues to construct such collaborative engineering environments Successfully. To effectively support integration and collaboration in the framework, the framework is built on the basis of a number of advanced technologies, such as service-oriented architecture, intelligent software agents, and Web services. Based on service-oriented architecture and Web services technologies. the framework is able to utilize and integrate effectively various engineering resources on the geographically distributed computing environments. And through intelligent agent technologies, it supports cooperation and coordination mechanisms for the engineering activities. In this paper we describe the implementation of the framework in detail. In addition, we present the applicability of the framework with a case study. (C) 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.